Cape Cod

by William Martin

  And the French sergeant ordered his men to fire. But of the fifty French weapons fired, at least forty were poorly sighted, aimed by shaking hands, or improperly powdered, so that only four shots reached the English.

  God, fate, or a French marksman chose Robinson Bigelow as one of the four. His beaklike nose, which had earned him the name Honker, was blown apart. He dropped his cutlass, spun about, and came stumbling toward Christopher.

  Now the English sergeant gave the word. A thunderous volley echoed from the flanks. But Christopher did not hear it. His eyes were fixed on Robinson, who held his hands to his face, as if to hold back the blood welling like springwater through his fingers. “Robby, lad—”

  Now the English sergeant ordered the charge, and his regulars lowered their pikes. But Christopher put his arms around Robinson Bigelow and tried to lower him to the ground while all about him he felt the nervous scuttling of leaderless militiamen, men seeing the effect of French gun on English flesh for the first time.

  Robinson Bigelow’s eyes were the eyes of a cow the moment after the butcher had slit its throat. Where the ball had embedded itself, the blood bubbled up unstanched. He opened his mouth to call the charge, but first poured out blood from the shattered bone behind the nose, then strange, squashed sounds from a voice that no longer had an upper cavity to give echo. He spun away from Christopher, staggered against someone else, and fell face-forward into the grass.

  Jonathan Hilyard drew his cutlass and tried to take command of the right flank. “C’mon, lads. Let’s show ’em what good Protestants can do.”

  Most did nothing but mill about.

  Only the Roundheads were closing, with their pikes pointed and their voices bellowing a fierce animal roar.

  The French were no more disciplined than the New England volunteers. While their first rank attempted to clear and reload, the second rank stumbled forward in undrilled haste. They presented their weapons. They took aim. And the pikes of the English professionals struck.

  Now Jack Hilyard shouted, “What’s that just come from that house over there? Smoke?”

  Christopher was supposed to answer, but he was cradling Robinson Bigelow in his arms and trying not to vomit.

  “Act like men!” Jonathan came back among them. “Others gain all the glory.”

  “Let others die,” said Christopher.

  Jonathan whacked his brother with the side of his cutlass. “Bloody coward! Avenge Robby Bigelow ’stead of losin’ thy stomach.”

  “But, Jonathan,” screamed Jack Hilyard, “up there, they be shootin’ at us!”

  The smoke was thick enough that none could dispute what Jack said. The French might have been firing from every house on the flanks of the fort. In truth, there was no fire. The Roundheads had driven into the center of the French, breaking their line and their spirit like rotten staves.

  Jack knelt beside Christopher and shouted, “They’re firin’ on us from that house, son. I say teach ’em a lesson.”

  Christopher looked at Robinson Bigelow. “He needs help.”

  “He’s beyond help,” shouted Jonathan. “Now get up and help yourself… and your company.”

  “If your own brother won’t join the fight,” said a Massachusetts man, “don’t expect us to do for you.”

  Jack grabbed Jonathan by the arm. “I just seen more smoke from that house.” He pointed to the church. “Let’s take a handful of men and bring a bit of glory to Cape Cod!”

  “I attack the center. Attack what you will.” Jonathan stepped over the writhing blood spring of Robinson Bigelow and led a dozen of the bravest at the French line.

  Jack led a dozen of the most cautious toward the spire.

  “Arrêtez-vous!” The wizened little friar stood blinking in the bright sunlight when the door came smashing into his hallway.

  “Where be your guns?”

  “C’est une église, un sanctuaire. Allez-vous-en.”

  “Your guns? Vo-tra fu-sils?”

  “Fusils? Nous sommes prêtres. Nous n’avons pas de fusils.”

  “These be priests!” said one of the Massachusetts men.

  “I seen guns,” insisted Jack. He also saw a great refectory to the left and a library to the right.

  He ordered three men upstairs, two more into the refectory, and he shoved his son into the library. All through the house could be heard the pounding of heavy New England boots and the angry chattering of the French priests. The angriest of all was the one who stood at the door and now followed Jack and his son.

  “Vo-tra fu-sils?” demanded Jack again, and he swept a pile of books off a shelf.

  The priest screamed and jumped at Jack, who slammed him against the doorjamb.

  “Father!” cried Christopher. “We be Christians.”

  “We be fightin’ for our future, lad, so take that frighted look from your face and help out.”

  Jack swept through another shelf of books, of saints’ lives, of Thomas Aquinas, of Franciscan philosophy. All crashed to the floor, and the priest jumped at Jack again.

  Jack pushed him at his son. “Hold the little pest, or thou won’t ever dig clams on Nauseiput.”

  Christopher Hilyard threw his arms around the priest and drew him to his breast, as if to protect him. Blood trickled from the priest’s shaved pate down into the little white fringe of the tonsure.

  Christopher thought, Enough blood. I have seen enough blood for a lifetime.

  Then came the crash of another shelf, a muffled cry of excitement, and Jack said, “Now!”

  Christopher spun the priest toward the window and the view of the battle, which had turned to a rout. The priest tried to pull away, but Christopher was near twice his size, and for all they had gone through, he would not let his part in the plan fail.

  “Look, little priest. Look at what fools we be, we French and English.”

  “Mère de Dieu,” muttered the priest at the sight.

  Then Christopher held up the hand still covered with Robinson Bigelow’s blood. “Look at what Christians can do to each other.”

  “Mère de Dieu.”

  Jack slipped an iron box from the sack on his belt. It was sealed with wax and contained a captain’s journal that Jack had bought in Boston. Its pages were blank. This he dropped into the mess of papist books on the floor. Then he knelt and touched his dream, while Christopher tried to wipe the blood from his hand.

  CHAPTER 13

  July 9

  Old Comers and New Buyers

  Never mind the name. How in the hell did Jack Hilyard ever get his hands on this place? That’s what Janice wanted to know.

  At Radcliffe, she had written her undergraduate History thesis on Cape Cod land grants, and she knew that Jack’s Island had been part of the Old Comers’ land, a tract that included present-day Brewster, Harwich, and Orleans.

  Old Comers. Even in the seventeenth century, they distinguished between the ones who got their fence posts in first and all the rest. Before anyone called them Pilgrims, all of the first settlers were called Old Comers and sometimes First Comers. But the Old Comers who paid off the colony’s debts were a special group whose service had earned them control over a vast stretch of Cape Cod. They were revered men. Little was known of Jack Hilyard, except that he wasn’t one of them.

  “It may be,” she had written, “that he earned this island because of service in the trading posts, though he had already been given a tract on Billingsgate Island. It may be that he was allowed to purchase the island after his family fought at Port Royal in August 1654. Jonathan Hilyard is singled out for bravery in the only eyewitness account of the battle. According to Plymouth records, the sale from Ezra Bigelow to Jack Hilyard occurred soon after. The two events may be related.”

  Maybe, maybe not. What was important now was how in the hell to get the whole island back so that they could put it to work.

  To reach the sailing camp, she took the east road through pitch pine woods, past the campers’ army-surplus barracks, and she wonde
red how a few dozen well-sited, well-designed houses could do anything but improve this.

  Rake Hilyard said they couldn’t, and Geoff no longer seemed to be sure. But Hilyard men were dreamers. Hilyard women were different. Cousin Emily ran the sailing camp and liked the Bigelow deal. Her mother Clara was one of the oldest of the Old Comers, and even if she had sided with Rake, she was someone you could reason with.

  The main house was a classic turn-of-the-century ark, with high peaks and gables and great rambling porches. Perfect for a sales office.

  A dozen students were draped on the veranda. Some looked like homesicks waiting for parents. A few were brandishing fiberglass bows and arrows. And one little kid was sitting on a step, scratching at the runniest case of poison ivy Janice had ever seen. But what self-respecting kid would care about poison ivy when he had sailboats, the tennis court, the archery range around him?

  In the big rooms downstairs, voices echoed and phones rang and hundreds of sandy bare feet wore the wax off the floor. Even in its last season, the business of the sailing camp went on. But upstairs, where the family lived, the rooms were quiet and the floors were still shiny.

  The wheelchair pivoted at the sound of Janice’s knock. “What? Who is it?” Clara’s eyes were failing. Most of the time, she kept them turned to the sea.

  “It’s me, Janice.”

  “Who?” The old lady wet her lower lip with her tongue.

  “Janice. Geoff’s wife.” She came closer.

  The rheumy old eyes examined her, the hanging lip tightened into a bit of a smile.

  “How are you?”

  “Rotten.” That was what she always said. “Arthritis so bad it’s like havin’ baseballs for joints. Hemorrhoids so bad it’s like havin’ fireballs in my—

  Janice gave her a little box of chocolates.

  “Soft centers?”

  “Of course.”

  “Can’t chew ’em otherwise. Can’t chew. Can’t walk. Sometimes can’t even breathe.” She pointed to the oxygen tank in the corner.

  Janice noticed the smell of urine, something new in Clara’s decline, and sadly pervasive.

  Janice tried to remember the Clara who kept two dozen lobster pots in the bay, just for fun, and could knock back highballs like a fisherman. It hurt to look for her in this old shell, but Janice tried, because Geoff’s aunt had been the first Hilyard to treat her like family.

  “Has Rake talked to you lately?” asked Janice.

  “The only one who does… talk I mean. Everyone else sounds like they think I’m their dog. “ ‘Do you want your supper? Do you want to go for a walk?’ Rake says things.”

  “Has he talked about what you might do if you lose at town meeting?”

  Clara narrowed her eyes, and the lower lip worked back and forth several times. “You got a pen and some paper?”

  Janice looked around the room.

  “You won’t find ’em here. That bastard of a son-in-law of mine took ’em all away.”

  Janice dug into her bag and pulled out a little notebook and a plastic Bic with the cap chewed off.

  The old lady snatched them and opened the notebook on her wheelchair tray. Then she fitted the pen between her fingers and wetted her lower lip with her tongue.

  “What are you going to write?”

  “A new will.” She lifted her hand onto the paper and tried to move the pen. Her fingers were so arthritic that she looked as if she were trying to push a giant piece of thread into the eye of an invisible needle. A few wavering words took shape: “I, Clara Hilyard Hartwig…”

  “Can I help?” Janice gently slipped the pen from the ancient fingers.

  “Put down that I am cutting Arnie and Emily out. If the town won’t take our land at the town meeting, I’ll give it to them for conservation.”

  Janice’s hand froze. “Clara… have you talked this over with anybody?”

  “No. And if you won’t write it, give it back.”

  Janice held on to the pen and paper.

  “Come to think of it, Emily and Arnie want to sell to your old man.” Clara snatched the notebook back. “Why did you come here, anyway?”

  “To see how you were.”

  “You came to sweet-talk me, just like Emily and Arnie. I always thought you came ’cause you liked me.” Clara handed back her chocolates. “I thought you were a better person.”

  That hurt, but here was Janice, scuffling around with chocolate boxes, hoping to persuade Clara to do something she had resisted all her life, simply because they couldn’t wait for her to die.

  The truth, beyond what was said on the glorious Fourth, was that the Bigelows were in a cash crunch and had to start development soon to get out of it. Janice’s brother had told her in the office that morning. She suspected there was more, that her brother was the cause of the crunch, and when she pressed him, he wasn’t too clear about how he planned to get them out of it. She didn’t trust Douglas much. Nobody had trusted him much since he’d divorced his first wife and started slicking back his hair.

  But when it came to talk, Douglas was still a pro, and he knew exactly what to tell his sister. He begged her to trust him and swore her to secrecy… for Dad. Dad knew they were in trouble, but he had been in the hospital when the worst of it came in, and Douglas had done what was necessary to rescue them. “If we go down, the old man will die,” he had said. For Janice, there was no more convincing argument. So however badly she felt, she had come to do more than just visit old Clara.

  Maybe she would start by humoring the old lady. So she took back the notebook, tore off the top sheet, and dropped it on the wheelchair tray. Then she wrote out the will and read it back, just to show Clara how impractical it sounded.

  “If the townspeople are too cheap to buy the place,” she asked, “why just give it to them?”

  Clara just held out her hands until Janice gave her the notebook. She signed it. Then she sat back and smiled. “Why? Because my daughter married a son of a bitch and turned into a bitch herself.”

  Right on cue, Arnie Burr appeared in the doorway, wearing a sheaf of arrows and holding a fiberglass bow. “A visitor, Clara?”

  “Yeah, you plannin’ to shoot her?”

  “I should, for tellin’ us we could survey land when we couldn’t.” Arnie shot a little arrow of a look at Janice. “But I’m teachin’ the camp archery lesson today.”

  Clara talked to Janice, as though Arnie weren’t there. “He can’t get business on his charter boats, and there’s nothin’ to survey until Rake and me die, so he gets himself up like a half-asked Cupid and teaches camp kids how to shoot arrows into each other.”

  “What’s on that paper, Clara?” asked Arnie.

  The old lady grabbed the sheet from the tray and tried to stuff it into her dress.

  But Arnie snatched it away. “ ‘I, Clara Hilyard Hartwig…’ We told you, Clara, if you want a lawyer, just ask us.”

  “Lie.” She looked at Janice, “I wrote a will and they found it under my mattress and took it away from me.”

  Arnie shoved the paper into his pocket. “Clara, we don’t want you doing something you might regret.”

  “I regret that my daughter married you.”

  “We love her, Janice, but she’s stubborn.” He snapped the bowstring, as if he was itchy to use it.

  “We all love her, and we want her to be happy.” Janice gave Clara a kiss on the forehead, and Clara looked at her like a dog that knew it was being put to sleep. Janice scurried out like the dog’s owner. What Clara, with her terrible eyesight, did not know was that she had grabbed the first sheet of paper, which showed only her own scrawl.

  Her signed bequest was in the notebook that was now in Janice’s purse. But it couldn’t be legal, could it? Janice almost didn’t want to know.

  ii.

  Rake Hilyard sat at his dining room table. He had his telephone, his typewriter, his scratch pad, and all the papers and articles he had collected over the years… on just about everything that had inte
rested him.

  He called it his office. His niece Emily called it a firetrap. Rake guessed she said that so that some night her husband could burn the place down.

  It was ten-thirty in the morning, and he had already made forty phone calls to remind people about the town meeting. His ear felt like a piece of pounded veal. But if the taxpayers would take the island, the Bigelows could be stopped from ripping it to pieces.

  He took his breakfast plate out to the kitchen and threw it into the sink. Egg yolk had dried on his fork and his chin. He had lived to be ninety and ate an egg every day, damn the doctors. He smoked, too, damn them all.

  Helluva thing that a man had to petition a town meeting because he couldn’t trust his own family. But there it was. Even Geoff and his Bigelow wife wanted to develop the island.

  And a helluva thing how it all seemed to start at once, noises about Bigelow trouble with the banks, then the talk that it was time to develop the gem of Bigelow properties, Jack’s Island, then the appearance of the 1904 subdivision that might allow the development to proceed whether the town objected or not, then the visit from that Carolyn Hallissey. More than funny.

  He slipped the list from his pocket. After Carolyn Hallissey’s visit, he had written down everything he had ever heard or wondered about the log. He thought that if he looked at the black and white for long enough, like a scientist studying results, he’d be sure to see connections.

  While he reheated a cup of coffee in a saucepan, he thought of a good hiding place for the list. He should protect it, because it might be the treasure map for millions of dollars. And there was something in that log that had scared Dickerson Bigelow’s grandfather to death in 1911. Rake remembered. It had to do with the painting Carolyn Hallissey had bought a few days before.

  He wrote “Murder on the Mayflower by Tom Hilyard” at the bottom of the list. Then he heard a sound.

  Out front? Now on the side. Now in the back.

  He had been waiting for this. He had suspected for some time that somebody was watching him.

  Hide the list. He went up the stairs to the picture on the landing. That would be a good place. Right there, inside the backing. Then he went up the rest of the way to the bedroom and grabbed what he called his security blanket, a pump-action shotgun.