Cape Cod

by William Martin

  “Then your hand… they saw your hand in the window.”

  “Don’t act the nervous nellie. It won’t help if we are stopped.”

  As the carriage took the turns before the courthouse, she watched Emulous and Heman walking into the road. Were they merely crossing, or stopping to inspect the depth of the wheel tracks? Then the carriage rolled down the hill and out of their view, and Captain Walker was jostled against Nancy.

  He laughed now, as though he was enjoying himself. “This slave runnin’ makes folks awful close awful fast, don’t it, Miz Rains?”

  “If I didn’t know you were an honorable man, Captain, I’d warn you that I carry a long hatpin.”

  “You’ve nothin’ to fear from me. But Jacob must be gettin’ a nice view, along about now.”

  Their legs were immodestly raised and their feet pressed against the front of the carriage. A blanket was draped over the legs, and the two frightened Negroes hid beneath.

  “I can’t see nothin’,” came the muffled voice from beneath.

  “Good,” said Nancy.

  The carriage ground through the village and started up the hill at the east end. If Emulous and Heman decided to follow, this was where they would catch up, and if they saw the way the horses labored to pull such a small load, suspicion would rise. Then Nancy and the captain would have to lie about their purpose for being alone together on a Tuesday night. If they did it well, they would endure gossip, if they did it poorly, arrest.

  Up they went, slow and slower, the steady snap of the driver’s whip popping in the night air, up past the Custom House, slower and slower, until at last Nancy could look out at the lighthouse on Sandy Neck.

  “Hallelujah,” she whispered.

  Then they heard horses coming up the hill. The captain raised his hand in a calming gesture. The hoofbeats came closer… faster… and went past with a rumble and a greeting to the driver.

  “See now,” whispered Walker, “most storms blow themselves out before they ever do a bit of damage.”

  And Nancy felt a bit better. It could not be said, however, that she felt brave or at all confident. She would have given anything that night to have been in her own house, reading her Jane Austen.

  But on they went, through the desolate stretches of Yarmouth and Dennis. To the south, on the treeless hills of the mid-Cape, the sails of the windmills turned in the moonlight, grinding the autumn grain, and their creaking echoed eerily across the land. To the north, beyond the meadows and marshes, the lighthouse beams pierced the blackness of the bay.

  From time to time, however, the desolation gave way to groves of new-planted pitch pine. Nancy had read that the Pilgrims found Cape Cod covered with trees and their descendants had stripped it bare in a few generations. She could not believe this, could not imagine it, for in the moonlight, the stunted trees looked like lost children wandering the sand, as homeless as the Negroes hidden beneath her legs.

  Along toward midnight, the carriage rocked into Brewster, where, it was said, there were more shipmasters than anywhere else in America. And most had built fine homes for land-bound quarterdecks.

  “Here’s where you see what seafarin’ has brought these last thirty-five years,” said Walker. “These fancy places tell you why most Cape Codders want no war over slavery.”

  “All lumber,” she muttered.

  “Eh?”

  “I rode the stagecoach last year. A miserable rainy day it was, and I said how inviting these houses looked. The man next to me laughed.”

  “Bad manners, I’d say.”

  “He was an Off-Caper, more plain-speaking than impolite.” Nancy watched the houses go by in stately procession. The windows in a few were illuminated, and here and there a lantern hung on pillar or fence post, awaiting a seafarer who might return that night or that month… or never. “He said these houses were nothing but lumber.”

  “Sounds like a charlatan. What was his name?”

  “Thoreau.”

  “What’s his claim?”

  “He’s a philosopher, makin’ a book about Cape Cod.”

  Walker laughed. “Easy life, ridin’ stagecoaches and scribblin’ words about the sights.”

  “Easier’n slavery.” Jacob now came up for air.

  Nancy rubbed her legs, which had begun to cramp in this strange position. “He said all men made themselves slaves to riches, and slavery was just one of many abominable institutions. I asked him what he would do to lead a worthwhile life. This was just after my husband’s death, you must realize, and I welcomed the words of a philosopher.”

  “Did he tell you to run slaves?” asked Dorothea.

  “He said to simplify. That was all… to simplify.” On this night, as she broke the law for the first time in her life, the words echoed in her mind.

  “Seems like we’re complicatin’ things,” said Walker.

  “Only to simplify something greater.”

  iv.

  Will and Mary Hilyard still lived in their house on Jack’s Island with their daughter Ruth. Their son Ephraim lived with his family in a little place on the east side of the island. Isaac, whose infant cry had drawn Sam Hilyard through the night in 1814, lived with his parents when he was not fishing the Grand Banks.

  The Hilyards were simple people. They grew corn, fished, and when the tide ran out, dug clams on the flats. Their days were a succession of large labors, their nights a litany of small tasks. They celebrated the Fourth of July and Christmas and voted in every election. They helped out when a friend’s barn burned or a friend’s baby was born, and they counted among their dead a son, drowned during the Great Gale of 1841.

  That they were not good Congregationalists did not cause them to be ostracized. The uncompromising faith of the First Comers was still strong. But in a place where God was made manifest twice a day by the tides, where all faced common hardships, tolerance had become necessity rather than virtue.

  Mary Burr Hilyard, her daughter, Ruth, and her son, Ephraim, were good Methodists. Isaac subscribed to no faith, but visited many churches in search of Jesus and attractive widows. Will went to Cape Cod’s famous Methodist camp meetings each summer, because he loved the spectacle of good folk stirred by a preacher and seized by the spirit, and he rejoiced to hear a congregation chanting out the devil and singing in the Lord.

  But for him, even this faith was too tame.

  As Nancy Rains and her two charges scurried toward the Hilyard house, having left Captain Walker and his carriage at the edge of the causeway, they heard singing from somewhere in the cornfield.

  “No farmer I ever knew sung to his corn,” said Jacob.

  “That’s the tune to ‘Old Dan Tucker,’ ” said Dorothea.

  An old man’s voice, high and thin, wavered up from the dried stalks: “Holy good God, make my corn grow. Holy good God, make my debts low. Holy good God, let me know thee, from here to kingdom come.”

  “Hallelujah,” grunted Jacob.

  “He’s the man we want.” Nancy called his name.

  The voice fell silent, and the white hair dropped below the corn plants.

  Nancy hiked up her skirts and went into the field. “Will! Will Hilyard!”

  “Who are you?” he cried in an even higher voice. “An angel or”—the voice dropped to a deep rumble and the head popped up in a new place—“a devil?”

  “I’m Nancy Rains.”

  The head appeared again, in another place, and he said, in a normal voice, “You’re a Come-Outer, ain’t you?”

  “Of a sort.”

  The cornstalks rustled, and the head rose a few feet away. “And you brung others?”

  “Friends… in need,” she said.

  Will thought about this, scratched his head, stared at the moon, as though it held some answer. Then he sang out, “A friend in need, he’s a friend indeed, and Come-Outers is better friends than most.”

  “If he the best we got,” muttered Jacob, “I for a-goin’ on my own.”

  “It’s his religion,
” explained Nancy.

  “What is he? One of them Jews?”

  “Hell no!” cried Will, surprising them with the power of his hearing. “I’m a good Christian with a different way.”

  “And we’re two black Baptists who still believe,” said Dorothea, “no matter what Christian slave owners done.”

  “Do you believe in slaveholdin’?” asked Jacob.

  And Will exulted, “We are all Come-Outers of the spirit, we are all white men in our souls.”

  “I think he tryin’ to be nice, but I ain’t white, inside or out.”

  Meanwhile, Captain Walker’s carriage was making its way from the causeway back to the County Road, and the lights of another carriage were bouncing toward the island.

  As the carriages approached each other, Walker heard He-man’s mother, Achseh, squawking away. She had taken up residence with her oldest and slowest son, Abraham, in a new house on the west side of Jack’s Island. Before good sense had set him on another tack, Walker had courted her, widower to widow, and knew her to be one of the busiest bodies on Cape Cod.

  “Who on earth are they, out so late at night? And what in tarnation are you doin’?” she shouted when Abraham turned their carriage onto the shoulder to let the other pass.

  “We’re out late, Ma,” said Abraham.

  “We been a-visitin’. What can they be doin’ on our island?”

  “ ’Tain’t all ours.”

  “The Hilyards, they’d never have a guest ridin’ a fine carriage like that, not them iggorant swamp Yankees.”

  “Ma, that ain’t… Why, good evenin’, Mr. Quintal.”

  Walker had hoped to escape recognition.

  “Quintal?” Achseh’s sagging old udder of a face peered out. “And Cap’n Walker?”

  “Good evenin’, Achseh.” Walker doffed his hat.

  “So, you come skulkin’ ’round in the middle of the night, thinkin’ to get my affection back?”

  “Nice to see you again.”

  “Nice? Nice, is it? You old slave stealer, you can just go and… and smell my feet!”

  At about this time, Will Hilyard was rapping on the door of his house. When he was in a prayerful mood, he did this by climbing a small ladder, scuttling across the roof, and banging on the door from above with a bull rake that left tooth marks in the wood. If nothing else, his strange faith had kept the old man quick and spry.

  A lantern appeared, the door opened, and a woman peered out. “Pa! Come d-d-d-down!”

  “Daughter Ruth, stop your stammerin’ and say hello to fellow Come-Outers, found in the cornfield.”

  Ruth Hilyard glanced into the shadows, as though expecting to see nothing. Then she looked again. Her eyes opened wide at the sight of the Negroes, her hand came to her breast, and she fainted dead away, right there in the hallway.

  Jacob looked at Dorothea, “Mebbe we was better off in that attic… or in the South.”

  Will was down the ladder now, fanning his daughter with his floppy hat and singing “Old Dan Tucker” to wake her.

  “Quiet!” shrieked Mary from her room. “Quiet that damn song and let a good Methodist get some sleep.”

  “That woman got no tolerance,” Will said. “Get out the way, Old Dan Tucker. Get out the way…”

  A man stumbled down the stairs, wearing nothing more than a red union suit. “Pa, we’ll be puttin’ blinders on you when that full moon pops out, ‘less you start actin’—”

  At the sight of Isaac Hilyard, Nancy stiffened her spine. Her husband had once taken him as mate and vowed never to do it again, for he was a crude and dangerous man.

  “Good evening, Mr. Hilyard.” Nancy stepped over Ruth and smiled a proper smile. “I thought you might be at sea.”

  Isaac furrowed his brow, as if trying to recall where he had seen this woman. His black hair and heavy beard were well matched to his presence, and he seemed not the least embarrassed to be seen in his underwear. “You thought wrong.”

  “She and her friends are Come-Outers,” offered Will.

  “I see two runaways and a slave stealer.” Isaac went into the great room and emerged a moment later, in a pair of greasy trousers that looked as though they could stand alone. “Who told you to come here?”

  “Mrs. Hannah Bigelow Dickerson,” said Nancy.

  “Got no use for Bigelows.” Isaac helped his sister up.

  Ruth brushed herself off and, with stammering cordiality, invited her late-night visitors into the parlor. At the mantel, she lit the two lanterns.

  Nancy might now have given Ruth a bit more attention but for the wreath above the fireplace, which Ruth delicately straightened, as though hoping her visitors might notice. It was made of hair. Not just any hair, it would seem, but the hair of the Hilyard family, a vine of beautifully woven browns, auburns, blonds, and whites, decorated with hair flowers. A lost art, thought Nancy, well worth losing.

  Isaac opened a panel near the fireplace and took out a bottle. “No use for Bigelows, none for runaway darkies, neither.”

  “Coloreds.” Jacob put his arm around Dorothea. “And we ain’t stayin’ where we ain’t wanted.”

  “That’s never stopped me.” Isaac took a long swallow from the bottle.

  Nancy turned to Will. “You’re the one we came to see, one Come-Outer to another.”

  Will pulled himself up straight and raised his chin. “Fire away to old Will Hilyard. He’ll do what he can.”

  “We need you to take us to Billingsgate, to your brother, Sam.”

  Will’s face dropped. “Him and me don’t have much truck. He thinks I’m an old fool. I think he’s an old hermit.”

  “You’re both right,” said Isaac.

  “I was told he has a boat that can take my friends to Canada,” said Nancy.

  Isaac laughed, loud and liquor-stunk. “The Nancy? That old thing’ll roll your eyes out, then drown you.”

  “That’s a risk we must take.” Nancy spoke firmly, feigning a confidence she knew she would need in truth, were she to accomplish her task with no better help than these Hilyards for help.

  “Smart people risk their necks for nobody,” answered Isaac.

  And Ruth asked Nancy, “Why… why would you risk your n-n-neck?”

  Nancy looked closely at her for the first time. Her features suggested that she was not more than forty-five, but her gray hair and palsied hands made her seem far older.

  “I risk my neck,” said Nancy, “for principle.”

  “Principle?” Isaac took another drink. “The only principle Bigelows know earns interest compounded quarterly.”

  “What’s this talk? Principle?” Mary Burr Hilyard, pickled in salt and dried in the wind, shuffled down the stairs. “Whose principle? And whose niggers?”

  “Coloreds,” said Jacob.

  “If none of you are willin’, I’ll look elsewhere,” said Nancy.

  Ruth took Nancy’s hand. “I c-c-c-can sail. I’ll take you to Billingsg-g-g-gate.”

  “You row a skiff up and down the bay, collectin’ hair from all your friends for another damn hair wreath, and you decide you’re a sailor?” said Isaac.

  Ruth ignored her brother and kept her eyes on Nancy. “I… I admire a person with pr-principles.”

  “I won’t allow it,” said Isaac.

  “You won’t, eh?” Mary smacked her toothless gums a few times to wake herself up. “Who died and made you king?”

  “I think we should do it,” said Will.

  “You don’t run things, either,” said Mary.

  “Petticoat democracy… I’m livin’ in a petticoat democracy.” Will began to hum “Old Dan Tucker,” which he did whenever he lost the courage to sing it.

  “I won’t allow it,” said Mary. “ ’S against the law.”

  Meanwhile, at Achseh Bigelow’s house, the old woman’s mind was spinning faster than her tongue.

  “Can you imagine the nerve of that Walker, comin’ to our island? Our island? I bet they was peekin’ in the windows lookin’ for u
s.”

  “I bet not.” Abraham yawned over a glass of buttermilk.

  “Then what, tell me, what was they doin’ here? Visitin’ the Hilyards? And why would that slave-stealin’, lawbreakin’ abolitionist son of—Why would he be visitin’ the Hilyards? Unless he was breakin’ a law… stealin’ a slave. Yes… stealin’ a slave!”

  Up the stairs she scurried to the spyglass she kept trained on the Hilyard house. And just as she had expected, a light was burning there. The Hilyards were up at an ungodly hour, and up to no good in the bargain. She was so excited that her hair fell out of its bun.

  She said that Heman and the county sheriff should know about this right away, and she insisted that Abraham ride to Barnstable. He offered to ride to the constable’s in Brewster, but that was not good enough. By Achseh’s lights, the constable was an abolitionist, while she was a good Daniel Webster Whig.

  Didn’t the Grand Old Man of Massachusetts come to Cape Cod every summer? He stayed in Mashpee and fished for trout. In Chatham he cast his feathered drail into the surf after bluefish. How could Webster support a law inimical to Cape Cod? And by simple logic, how could anyone opposing his law have Cape Cod interests at heart?

  Now, from the little attic window, she saw Hilyard’s front door opening. A long, rectangular beam of light cut into the blackness, and for a fleeting instant, she saw a man in a stovepipe hat enter the house.

  In the Hilyard parlor, Captain Walker caught his breath. “Where are they?”

  “Hid when we heard you comin’,” said Nancy.

  “Good. Achseh saw me. Move out as soon as the tide can take you, or you may get a visit from the sheriff.”

  “If we’re caught,” said Isaac, “the fine is a thousand dollars for each slave.”

  Will asked the captain, “Can’t you take them to Billingsgate?”

  “Too many people smell me in the wind. I don’t mind playin’ the bluff, but—”

  The sound of hoofbeats thumped past. Isaac peered out and announced that Abraham Bigelow was going down the road.

  Mary pulled her shawl around her shoulders. “Ridin’ off to warn the law, at a thousand dollars a slave.”

  Will went over to a corner and stood on a chair. “Good Lord, let us to know what to do.”