Sam looked at Mary’s salted-cured face and bony body, on which nursing breasts seemed as misplaced as teats on a tree. “I can work. And I brung this.” Sam slid the box across the table.
“The book?” Mary’s eyes narrowed to angry slits.
“You know of it?”
Will’s face matched his wife’s, line for line. “Two men come lookin’ for you every summer—”
“And they always ask ’bout the book. They always says they want the book back.”
“Englishmen, they are. With this war, they must sneak down through Halifax.”
Mary touched the box. “What’s in it?”
“Comeuppance,” said Sam, “for the Bigelows.”
Will and Mary both sat back, as though hearing at last the blasphemy they expected from this creature.
“You won’t find many who think that’s a good idea,” said Will. “Bigelow and Dickerson ships have kept Cape Cod goin’ all durin’ this war.”
“Privateers,” said Mary. “Without the prize money, folks in Brewster could never have paid the British.”
“Paid ’em?” said Sam. “For what?”
“The saltworks. The British commanders said they’d destroy the saltworks of any town that didn’t pay ransom. Eastham paid fifteen hundred dollars. It cost Brewster four thousand, on account of more board feet.”
“We fought the British,” muttered Sam.
“Maybe you had less to lose.” Will wrapped his hands around his teacup. They were big, muscular hands, nicked with tiny nail cuts and splinters, the hands of a man who kept his eyes close to the job in front of him. “Countin’ the Bigelow works, which we been runnin’ since the Doones died, and what I built, we have sixty-one hundred feet right here on Jack’s Island.”
“Hilyards workin’ for Bigelows. Times do change.”
“Don’t you come steppin’ out of the past and start to criticizin’ us for gettin’ along in a hard world.” Mary looked at Sam with a cold eye. “The Bigelows pay us good for what we do. Better than we could do by turnin’ against ’em.”
Sam looked at the flames on the hearth. He had once made love to a Bigelow woman before that fire. He could not fault his brother for doing business with Bigelows now. So he drew the book back and wrapped it in his ancient vest.
ii.
Word soon spread that a bearded stranger now lived in the hay crib of Will Hilyard’s barn. He was seen many times that summer, lost in the work of Jack’s Island. When the weeds grew up, he hoed the corn rows. When thunderclouds rose, he rushed out and closed the roofs on the salt vats. And when the tide ran out, he built a weir on the flats, so that the Hilyards would not risk British capture and impressment to catch fish.
Will told the townspeople that he had hired a new man. Mary said they had taken on another mouth to feed, but God would provide. And God did, though he did not see fit to free Sam from his guilt.
Sam told no one the nature of the Dragon’s cargo or the bargain he had made. He had wandered thousands of miles, but his sins haunted him still, and only forty miles of the easternmost peninsula in America remained to him. Somewhere between here and Provincetown, he would have to find his peace.
But there was no peace on Cape Cod.
This latest war found only four of fourteen towns in support of the American government. On the Upper Cape, Barnstable and Sandwich could afford to defy British ships because they were protected by barrier beaches and salt marshes. Falmouth supported the government but was open to the deep water of Nantucket Sound, so her ships were seized, her buildings cannonaded, and her local militia tested by British landing parties.
On the Lower Cape, only the town of Orleans remained loyal to the United States. Wellfleet had gone so far as to instruct the Committee of Safety to negotiate with the British and “at all times to keep in as much friendship with the enemy as possible, making the Constitution and laws of the United States… their guide as far as they can with safety to the particularly exposed position of the town to the enemy.”
Sam did not admire this attitude, but Cape Codders had learned to compromise with what surrounded them, and the Royal Navy remained a force of nature. So Cape Codders remained rebels, standing for independence, even if it was only their own.
With such political confusion a mirror of his own turmoil, Sam sought to lose himself in simple labor. His brother seemed a happy man for all the angles to his face and sharp edges to his wife. Perhaps the making of salt and the catching of fish could bring happiness to any man, though Sam thought the making of children also played a part.
And one child helped Sam. Will’s daughter Ruthie, for reasons that Sam could not fathom, made herself his closest companion. She followed him everywhere, helped him with his work, sat with him in the evenings, and asked him to help her in her Bible study.
“I’m not much for the Bible,” he answered, though kindly.
“We all must learn to fear God.”
“Deep wisdom for an eight-year-old.”
“My mother told me. She said it was something you should learn, too.”
And he was learning, but not in the way that the church-going Mary Burr Hilyard would recognize. God did not dwell beneath the steeple of the First Church, but on the flats that Sam and Ruthie rode over each day.
Sam had found few sights like the Brewster flats. There were many more impressive—the Whampoa Reach and the Bosporus—but nowhere had he felt so soothed. At dawn, a man looked out upon sand, six miles of sand from Quivett Creek to Rock Harbor, sand stretching two miles into the bay. By afternoon, the sand was covered complete in a deep blanket of blue. Then the sea ran out, revealing the flats to the silvering moon. More water weighing more than anything ever made by man, moving as effortlessly as the wind. He could live forever within such rhythms and come to feel part of the turning of the spheres, as natural as the tide in his failings and ambitions.
And if his ambition was to do no more than see his weir full of fish, the tide would satisfy him. Weir fishing lacked a certain nobility, to be sure, and luck played an even greater role than in most fishing pursuits, but it was also without the dangers of handlining, netting, or blockade-running. And most of all, it was simple.
A long stretch of net, suspended from twelve-foot poles, ran straight out from the beach. If the fish swam into it, they instinctively followed it toward deeper water, which led them into a wide circle of net and poles. The poles were usually no more than the trunks of sapling trees chopped down and stripped, and the net hung upon them like curtains in an unfinished room.
Upon entering this chamber, the fish would swim about until they found the opening to deeper water. Following their instinct, they would take this to the smallest part of the net, where most would remain in milling confusion and panic, until the tide ran out.
Then the net minder put on oilskins and boots waterproofed with tallow and collected the tools that he would need: a pitchfork or thin-tined manure fork to harvest the fish, a shovel to pound fresh mud into holes where the tide had loosened poles, and heavy twine, splicing awl, and sailmaker’s needle to mend any net that needed attention. To these, Sam added the axe he had recently rediscovered in the barn, as it was the perfect tool to cut thrashing sand sharks out of the netting.
Then he and little Ruthie climbed onto their horsecart and went out to see what nature had provided.
Sometimes nature provided nothing. Sometimes the netting churned with bluefish, mackerel, or the king of fishes, the striped bass. Sam wondered that the First Comers had not named this place Cape Striper. No fish was more delicious or plentiful, and this day he and Ruthie harvested them with a pitchfork.
He tried not to imagine the panic of the fish as the tide receded and they swirled to escape. Hundreds of stripers lay flank to belly, like bodies stuffed belowdecks. Their gill rakes stretched out, grasping for the last drops of oxygen. Their magnificent black stripes faded in the sun. But their eyes remained like dull coins, neither accusing nor comprehending. And that wa
s the mercy of nature.
“I hate it when they die, Uncle.”
“The bass ate the squid and we eat the bass,” Sam said to his niece. “One creature serves the next.”
“A bit like slavery, eh, guv?”
The voice caused the hair to rise on the back of Sam’s neck. If he sought to lose himself in his work, he had done it too well and had not noticed two strangers crossing the flats.
He grabbed Ruthie and put her behind him. His body and the flimsy wall of netting were their only protection. He pointed the pitchfork at the bigger man, a semi-toothed brute who smiled and bowed to the metal tines. “We’re a bit late this year, what with the bloody war and all.”
“What do you want?”
“Why… the book. What else would bring a good Englishman into this backward country every summer?”
Sam did not remember this man but sensed that he should. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”
The man’s brow sloped as he laughed. “I’m Runkle, foreman of Moseby ’all, ’ere on a bit of a…’oliday.”
The other one cackled. He was smaller than Runkle, but no less scrofulous in filthy clothes and eye patch. From the top of his left boot protruded the haft of a knife, and in the pocket of his coat was the outline of a pistol.
“Squire Bellamy wants his book back, and ’e promised me ’arf of whatever it fetches, if I get it.”
“What made him so certain that I survived?”
“The Jamaican bookseller you went to. Your uncle brought the book to ’is uncle eighty years ago.”
And Sam was reminded of an old saying, that coincidence was God’s way of preserving his anonymity. God did not want Sam to have this book. But Sam would have it, if only to control its destiny.
He gave Ruthie a reassuring little wink. She was staring at him, wide-eyed yet unable to comprehend the threat. For an instant, her face became the face of the little African girl, staring up at him from the swarming sharks.
“Step out of the weir, now, folks, and we’ll go get what we come for, what’s rightful our employer’s.”
“We’ll be stayin’ here.”
“Squint,” said Runkle, and the little one pulled the pistol from his pocket.
Sam laughed, his teeth showing white through his beard. “You tryin’ to scare me with that little thing? This nor’west wind’s liable to blow the ball back in your face.”
“Put down the pitchfork and step out the net.”
“All we need’s to wait. Someone’ll see us soon enough.”
Runkle looked up and down the coast. “No ’ouses in sight, but for your brother’s. And no one to ’ome just now.”
Runkle was right about that. The family had sailed to Barnstable for provisions. If Sam called for help, his cries would be lost in the wind that boomed across the bay and blew little froths across the tide pools.
Runkle pulled out his knife and cut into a net string. “Maybe we’ll take the little girl’s thumb for a souvenir, if we can’t get what we come for.”
Ruthie clutched tighter to her uncle’s leg.
“Stay away.” Sam jabbed the pitchfork in the air.
Runkle cut another string, as methodically as a surgeon trimming a wound. “She’s awful pretty. That thumb’ll look grand on the tack room wall.”
“Hurt her and get nothin’.”
“I’m gettin’ nothin’ as it is. So I’ll take a bit of somethin’.” Runkle cut the net halfway to the ground.
Sam felt the little girl’s arm twined around his leg. The cold wind gusted against his neck. And he studied his predicament calmly as he could.
There was Runkle to his left, Squint to his right, and the little horsecart backed up to the opening in the net between them. In the boot of the cart, he noticed his tools, among them the shovel he had brought to reset the loosened poles on the right side of the net. If one pole came down, he had told Ruthie, half the net could come down with it.
Now he prayed that it would be so. He said his Chinese name in his head, like the “amen” to his prayer: Huoyan Jinqang.
He swung the pitchfork away from Runkle and drove it, with all his strength, into the loose pole. The swiftness of his motion paralyzed the two thugs for just a moment, which was long enough. The pole came out of the mud and began to fall. Another came with it, then another, and down came a ten-foot section of netting onto Squint, whose pistol went off with an impotent little pop.
From the other side, Runkle slashed with his knife and lunged into the fortress of string. Sam, better-footed among the fish, skittered toward his cart, so Runkle turned on Ruthie, who turned to run.
Runkle’s left hand grabbed her collar, his right hand swept the knife to her throat… and his left hand came off—clean off. His fingers were still hooked into the fabric, but his forearm was now pumping blood like bilge.
As Ruthie stumbled away, the hand fell into the dead fish. As Runkle reached out instinctively to save it, the axe struck him in the back of the neck and took off his head.
Squint screamed and flailed madly, but Sam Hilyard hacked him in half as though he were no more than a sand shark caught in the net.
Then he felt his own blood trickling into his mouth and running onto his beard. The impotent little pop of Squint’s pistol had not been so impotent after all.
iii.
There were as yet no newspapers to affirm the facts and suspicions of daily life on Cape Cod. The disappearance of two drifters was nowhere officially noted, and given the present “ruinous and unhappy war,” neither was it spoken of at the inns or taverns. Many years later, a dragger would pull from the sea a beheaded, dishanded skeleton, and another severed completely in half, but by then the players in the drama would be dead, save for Ruth Hilyard, who had buried the event in the depths of her mind, even as it happened.
For their news, Cape Codders relied on town criers, broadsides, and those time-honored methods of discourse, gossip and rumor. Good ministers warned against the last of these, but gossip and rumor, if nurtured long enough, sometimes grew into legend.
About a month later, a story was told of a Barnstable woman making boat trips down the bay. She was well known, the daughter of First Comers, married to a China trader turned privateer. She had traveled the world on her husband’s ships and now oversaw the family investments while her husband raided British commerce. But for most of the autumn of 1814, she devoted herself to nursing a man on the dunes of Billingsgate Island.
Most people believed the man to be Sam Hilyard, since he had begun in the employ of Will Hilyard and had later taken up residence in the Billingsgate house that Ned Hilyard had built almost sixty years before. It was also rumored that the woman had once been in love with the man.
When his identity was finally revealed, heads nodded and tongues wagged, and there was talk in some parishes that Eldredge Dickerson had been cuckolded by a Hilyard. When the war ended and the fortunes of the Dickersons and Bigelows began to grow, a few of the more resentful farmers and fishermen took comfort in this. But the truth was somewhat different.
When she heard rumors of Sam’s return, Hannah Bigelow Dickerson went to Jack’s Island to see for herself if he was alive and if he could take the helm of a privateer. She considered huoyan jinqang as a fine quality in wartime as her husband’s calm calculation.
But she learned from Mary and Will that he had gone to Billingsgate under rather shadowed circumstances…. His enemies had come back…. There had been a shooting…. Little Ruthie had been endangered…. Sam had left for the good of the family, in spite of his wound….
“Wound?”
“He’ll survive,” said Will, studying his hands and cracking his knuckles. “He’s tough and we’ll pray a prayer for him.”
“He’s gone from here,” said Mary harshly. “That’s what matters. He’s gone, and that damn book with him.”
That damn book. Now Hannah had another reason to see Sam, though she did not believe what she saw.
He lay on a mo
ld-rotted mattress in the dark of a September morning. Blood was caked in his beard, in his ear, on his pillow, and on the grotesquely swollen right side of his face. His eyes were staring at the ceiling as though it might hold the answer to some question of infinity.
“Sam?”
His eyes turned to her, sad, old man’s eyes. When he recognized her, he closed them and shook his head.
“Sam?”
Painfully he managed a rasp, “Go away.”
She touched his forehead. “No fever.”
“Go away.”
“Sam, you could die.”
He closed his eyes and put his head back, as though that would be all right.
The pistol ball had struck him in the upper lip, passed through his sinuses, and come to rest near the hinge of his jaw, causing every movement of his mouth to feel like a knife stab. But the bleeding had stopped, and a clean crust had begun to grow over the surface of the wound.
“No infection,” she said, touching around the edges.
“Go away. Let me die. If Ruthie don’t see me again, she won’t remember…. Let me die.”
She looked around the little cottage, at the sand-filled corners and rodent droppings and the cold ashes on the grate. She built him a fire, then took to the broom.
Hannah was a woman of some standing on Cape Cod, and there were others to do physical labor for her now. But she could still work. Many Cape Codders considered it a matter of honor to work hard, others took it as a sign of virtue, and even among the rich, there were few who were fat.
Hannah swept the place clean and brought in water. She washed his bloody pillowcase and dirty clothes. She brewed tea. She ordered her servant to buy a piece of haddock at one of the other shanties on the island. From this she made a thin fish soup, which she forced him to swallow.
When she was done, he was sitting up in a shaft of sunlight. She felt enormously satisfied at the difference she had made in his little world, but he did not smile.
“Next time I’ll trim your beard,” she said cheerfully.
“Let me die, Hannah. That’s why I came here.”
Cape Cod Page 48
