Cape Cod

by William Martin

  “Shut up,” said Mary.

  Ruth wrung her hands. “ ’Tis t-t-time to get dressed.”

  Walker acted as if he saw none of this. He pulled his watch from his vest and turned to Isaac. “You got a good wind out the west—thank God for that—and an outgoin’ tide, I cal’late, in an hour and a half.”

  “I’m goin’ back to bed.”

  Walker took a step toward him. “I heard it said that you’re a bad man when the goin’s good and a worse one when it’s bad.”

  “Here, now.” Mary pushed herself between Isaac and the captain, like any mother shielding a wastrel son from the truth. “You’ll speak with Christian charity in this house.”

  “Why should he s-s-s-speak with Christian ch-charity,” said Ruth, “in a house where there ain’t any?”

  And Will began to sing “Old Dan Tucker.”

  While this was going on, Jacob and Dorothea were hiding in the root cellar of the barn behind the house. It was cold and damp and the floor had a strange, burned smell that, once it struck, stayed in the nostrils.

  Dorothea put her head back against the stones and closed her eyes. The journey from another attic to another cellar to the hold of yet another ship had been more arduous than ever she had imagined. And her fear for her unborn child magnified her pain. “I hope they know what they doin’.”

  “I know one thing. The slave catchers ain’t takin’ us without no fight. We through with ‘yassuh’ and ‘nosuh.’ ”

  “What you doin’?”

  “Lookin’ for stuff.” He was on the other side of the little hole, holding a lantern up between the floor joists. Whatever he was looking for, he found a tool hidden atop two spreaders. Its head was wrapped in oily rags. He tore the covering off and held up an axe with a blade the width of a man’s hand, sharp and shining. “Here’s somethin’ for a colored man to fight with.”

  She scrambled over to him. “Kill a white man, you won’t never live to see your… to see the baby.”

  “But havin’ a weapon, that make you a man.” He slid down beside her.

  “This make you a man.” She took his hand and put it on her belly.

  “I know.” His hand lingered a moment; then his arm encircled her waist. With his other hand, he held up the axe. “It’s still a fine-lookin’ tool, honey, what with that writin’ and all. What do it say?”

  “The Quaker ladies, they didn’t teach me no letters like that,” said Dorothea. “I don’t know what it say, and I don’t care, neither.”

  Jacob laughed a bit, to calm her. “Mebbe it’s Ibo for God bless the good Bigelows and God damn the bad.”

  “Or God bless our baby.” With a piece of ancient charcoal, she wrote the four strange letters on the floor joist above her. After them she wrote, “God bless the good Bigelows, God damn the bad, and God bless our baby.” Then she drew the Drinkin’ Gourd so that other slaves would know who had been here.

  v.

  It was said on Cape Cod that three things were most likely to kill you—the sea, childbearing, and old age. If a man quit the sea before it got ‘round to taking him, if a woman lasted till her monthlies were finished, they would usually reach three score and ten with their sails blown full.

  Sam Hilyard was eighty-seven, as tough as smoked mackerel, with a beard that fanned from a black mustache to a fringe of white that looked like melting snow around the top of his collar. Some had taken to calling him Methuselah, for they saw in the length of his life a sign of God’s reward to a good man. Sam saw it differently.

  In the gray dawn, when the mist hung heavy on the sand and the bay and sky were the color of bilge, when he sat in the shadows and wondered what his days might have been like had he lived them out with Hannah Bigelow, Sam knew that God had given him longevity to curse him, so that he might meditate upon his fury a bit longer, hear the screaming of the slaves once more, and in his madness kill Kwennit again—all to own a book that proved nothing.

  He was cooking corn mush in the dawn light when he heard voices on the dune.

  He threw a dash of cinnamon into the pot, in case some island children were coming to visit. Then he heard a high, thin voice singing “Old Dan Tucker.”

  He threw open the door and shouted, “I told you I got no interest in real religion. Don’t come down here singin’ your damn fool songs and doin’ your Jesus jumpin’.”

  Will grinned. “Me and the girls sailed down alone.”

  “Hello, Uncle Sam.” Ruth smoothed her hair and straightened her blouse.

  Sam touched the scar that still showed beneath his mustache. He felt a familiar twinge of pain from the pistol ball in his jaw. Then his gaze fell upon the other woman.

  He had seen her only a few times in thirty-six years. The last had been at the service for her mother, who died in India, while “keeping house” aboard her husband’s ship. Sam had taken Nancy’s hand that day and held it longer than any mere stranger should have. She must have wondered why one who had barely known her mother would struggle so to hold back his tears. She could not have known that he had been crying for himself.

  But he had held to his principle. He had protected the honor of Hannah Bigelow Dickerson.

  Now his granddaughter stepped boldly forward and introduced herself. “Mr. Hilyard, we need your help.”

  “There’s nothin’ I can do for you, young lady.”

  She shoved an envelope into his hands. “It comes from my grandmother.”

  Dear Sam,

  The day is here. Your life has been comeuppance for your sins. Now comes your chance for redemption. Do not misuse it.

  Your oldest friend,

  Hannah

  P.S. Eldredge has gone to his reward, and you and I face ours. Perhaps the time for truth is here. Help the girl and tell her what you will. Hunker in your cottage, and forever hold your peace.

  Sam read the letter twice, holding it close because he did not want the others to read it, though not too close because his eyes were not good. He turned it over to see if anything was written on the back, perhaps a second note, suggesting that it was all a joke. Then he said, “What could an old man do for you?”

  “It’s what you can do for them.” Nancy pointed toward the catboat run up on the beach between two rotting blackfish carcasses.

  A week earlier, a herd of blackfish, known also as pilot whales or puffin’ pigs, had come into Blackfish Bay, sending the men of Billingsgate rushing for their boats. A blackfish rendered a barrel of oil worth twenty dollars, and before anyone from Wellfleet or Eastham had the chance, the Billingsgaters got their boats around the herd and drove them right onto the beach. There they slaughtered them, skinned them, and took their heads for the melons of oil.

  It was bloody business, not something Sam Hilyard relished. As the blackfish died, they gave out strange, childlike cries, and their sad smiles made them seem almost human. And for weeks after, the carcasses would lie there, rotting in the sun, filling the sky with the stench of death, like black Africans washed up from their ocean graves.

  At first, Sam did not see the faces peering over the bow, as they were all but covered with sailcloth to ward off the stench, and he was not looking for black skin. He saw that every night as he drifted to sleep, but he had not seen a living Negro in many years. Now two of them were rising from the sea, alive amidst the dead whales.

  “There’s a new law against what we’re doin’,” Will said proudly, as though defiance of his wife had taken him across the bar to a brave new sea.

  “I know,” said Sam. “There ain’t much place to hide ’em on an island with no trees.”

  “We don’t want for you to hide them,” said Nancy.

  “I can’t put ’em to work cleanin’ up the carcasses from the slaughter or—” Sam saw a little sharpie coming by the lighthouse and running north along the shore. This was no good. He went down to the catboat, pulled away the sailcloth, and looked into the eyes of Jacob the slave.

  “You the one sailin’ us to Canada?” asked Jac
ob.

  “ ’Tain’t been discussed.”

  “Why, mister, you as old as Methuselah.”

  Sam saw the weapon in the Negro’s hand. “I thought I hid that axe good and proper.”

  “We was hid good and proper, too.”

  Sam tucked the sailcloth down tight. “Stay hid, and keep the axe the same way.”

  Will scurried over the dune. “That’s Isaac comin’ up.”

  The sun had just risen above the Eastham tableland, so that long red rays struck the sail and the man at the tiller. “By gar, you’re right,” Sam said. “Haven’t seen him in years. Haven’t missed him, neither.”

  The sharpie, a little flat-bottom boat of the sort that most Cape Codders learned to sail in their childhood, bumped neatly to rest a few feet from the catboat. Before he dropped the sail, Isaac was shouting, “When are you people gonna drag off your whales after you flense ’em?”

  “Breathe deep the stench,” said Will, “and think on the fate of the godless man.”

  “Shut up, Pa.”

  “What happened?” Nancy rushed over the dune, followed by Ruth.

  Isaac ignored them and took a long swallow from a rum bottle.

  “Still a good thirst, I see,” said Sam.

  “It burns out the stink of a place like this.”

  “Then why sail here to breathe it?”

  “Because no Bigelow comes to my house and tells me I’m hidin’ niggers, then calls me a liar when I say I ain’t, even if I am.”

  “Coloreds is what we is.” Jacob rose from under the sailcloth.

  Isaac took another drink. “Slaves is what you’ll be, if’n we don’t get goin’.”

  “Did Abraham b-b-b-bring the constable?” Ruth was fanning the air in front of her face to hold back the stink.

  “He rode all the way to Barnstable. Must’ve killed his horse. Brung back Heman and that green-toothed snake Emulous Whittaker. They said if Cap’n Walker been visitin’ us, we must be runnin’ slaves, and there was a law ‘gainst all that now. I said I didn’t know nothin’ ’bout no slaves, and even less ’bout some law.”

  Will pinched his nostrils against the stink, causing his voice to sound even higher. “What did your mother say?”

  “She told ’em they could go screw horseshoe crabs.”

  Sam laughed. “If I didn’t know that domineerin’ old witch, she wouldn’t be hard to like.”

  “Heman guessed we moved the slaves off, to someplace like Billin’sgate.”

  “We ain’t a-goin’ back,” said Dorothea.

  “Last I saw of Heman and the sheriff, they were thumpin’ out of Jack’s Creek in that old sow of a schooner, the Hannah.” Now Isaac held his nose. “I cal’late every seam’s opened since last time they caulked her.”

  “Will she sink?” asked Nancy.

  “Who cares? So long’s the seams on the Nancy are pounded tight.”

  “She’s a drum, sonny,” Sam said indignantly. “I could sail her to Jamaica tonight.”

  “Can you sail her to Nova Scotia?” asked Nancy.

  Sam knew the dangers, but if this was his last trip, he would not complain. “I wouldn’t be much of a man if I refused these brave colored folks, would I?”

  “No one’ll think less of you if you give me the helm and stay behind,” said Isaac. “Me and the widow can do fine.”

  Sam slipped the rum bottle from Isaac, took a drink, and threw the rest into the water. “I’d think less of me. Come as mate.”

  “Sail comin’ ’round the point!” cried Will.

  “That old sow’s faster’n I thought,” said Isaac.

  Ruth fanned the air. “I’m frightened. I thought I wouldn’t be, but I’m… I’m… f-f-f-f—”

  “We’re all frightened,” said Nancy.

  “We ready to get goin’,” said Jacob.

  “Then let’s go,” answered Sam.

  The Nancy was thirty feet, with a shallow draft and a broad beam, which meant she rolled but always righted herself. In his younger days, Sam had sailed her alone. Now he took a crew of two, Isaac and Nancy. “A misfit and a mother who should be home with her kids.”

  “What about me and Ruthie?” asked Will.

  Ruth continued to fan herself. Her grand moment of defiance had come and gone in the parlor of her parents’ home. Now her courage faded completely. “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t…”

  “We need you two to distract ’em,” said Sam. “Take the catboat and sail for Wellfleet. If they catch up to you, just tell ’em—Tell ’em you’re… I don’t know.”

  Ruthie suddenly brightened. The hand stopped waving. “I’ll tell ’em we’re out c-c-collectin’ hair for a wreath.”

  “You do that, sister,” Isaac said gently.

  “Hair for a hair wreath,” muttered Sam. She had been ruined by that damn book, too, and he wished he could do something to make amends. But when he went to embrace her, she pulled away, as she did from all physical contact.

  Will’s voice rose. “Hair for a hair wreath, prayer for a song. Get thee behind me, Satan.”

  Sam held up a finger, and Will stopped singing. “Decoy, Will. Haul ’em off. That’s what we need you to do. ’Sides”—Sam smiled now, the first sign of warmth he had shown his brother—“you start to singin’ ‘Old Dan Tucker’ in the Gulf of Maine, I’m liable to take and cut your pecker off with the axe that nig—that colored found in your barn.”

  Ruthie pulled out her shears and asked Jacob and Dorothea for a few locks of that curly, curly hair.

  It took the Hannah twenty minutes to weather Billingsgate Point against an east wind. By the time she came around to north’ard, she had tacked halfway to the Eastham coast, while Sam had provisioned, slipped his cables, and raised sail.

  “We try to run past ’em, we could hang up on Billin’sgate point,” warned Isaac.

  “We ain’t goin’ out to south’ard,” answered Sam.

  “The Slew?” Isaac clapped his hands and gave out a hoot. “If you’re game, me too.”

  Blackfish Bay, which people now called Wellfleet Harbor, was like a long seine of sand with the cod end at the north. Once you started north there was no escape, except for the hole between Jeremy Point and Billingsgate Island known as the Slew.

  The passageway was no more than thirty feet wide, maybe fifty long, a shallow and shifting little channel where even the best fishermen might take the tide going out and ground on a new bar coming back. Bluefish and striped bass loved to feed in the rips around it, but captains cursed it.

  Sam was taking it under the best conditions, an easterly wind and a tide just ebbing. He stationed Isaac in the bow to watch for green water, warned the others to stand by the sails and listen for the first rush of sand against the hull. Then he threw over the helm.

  He knew the Hannah could never follow him through, but she might be fast enough to catch him before he made it, so he pointed for the rip and prayed for some luck.

  Suddenly the sand rose on the port side. Isaac shouted. Sam spun the wheel. He felt the current clutch at the hull like a living creature. For a moment, the little sloop was broadside to the tide, and no more than ten feet from plugging up the Slew like a cork. But the ebb was steady and so was Sam’s hand, and he lifted the Nancy out of the current at the last instant.

  Now she would have to wear around and come at it once more, and by then the Hannah might be upon them.

  Sam bellowed at Isaac, “Sharpen your eyes, you bloody squint. Sing out afore the sand kisses the keel!”

  “Just point ’er east and keep ’er east, old man.”

  “Hannah’s comin’ fast!” cried Nancy.

  Jacob turned the axe twice in his hand. “I ain’t a-goin’ back. My baby be born a free man.”

  Suddenly, with a great luffing of her sails, the Hannah swung away from them, and into the wind!

  “What’s she doin’?” asked Jacob.

  And Sam let out a wild old laugh.

  The Hannah was turning after the catboat now
bucking its way across Wellfleet Harbor. The faint sound of “Old Dan Tucker,” sung by a father and his stuttering daughter, could be heard on the wind.

  “Get out the way, all you sand shoals!” cried Isaac.

  And old Methuselah, Hard Sam Hilyard, Huoyan Jinqang, steered the Nancy into Cape Cod Bay.

  The clean air struck first. The stench of dead whales was gone. Sam Hilyard breathed deep and told his black passengers to breathe free.

  vi.

  By evening, they were cruising north, just off Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The wind had backed into the southwest, promising warm blue days and starry nights. The sea rolled in long, gentle swells, and the Nancy became as a cradle in a bower, rocking its two black children to their rest in the forecastle.

  In his berth at the stern, Sam Hilyard could have slept through a storm. As it was, he slept more peacefully than he had in thirty-five years.

  The little sloop was silent but for the hiss of the waves along the hull. Isaac stood the helm. Nancy Drake Rains hunkered against the bulkhead, keeping her distance from him and keeping her thoughts to herself.

  It was good that this had happened so quickly, she thought. Courage came more easily when there was little time for reflection and a staunch grandmother giving the orders. Even with the Hannah pounding after them and her knees shaking uncontrollably, Nancy had not questioned the rightness of what she had done. Her sons, eating their supper that night in Hannah’s dining room, would be proud. Her husband would have been.

  She had acted upon a simple truth, and it had clarified her life. There would be time for Jane Austen later. She felt the coolness of the night and the comforting scratch of a woolen pea coat against her neck, and she knew that she would be able to help other runaways, even if it meant acting in concert with a man such as Isaac Hilyard.

  Isaac looked at her, then at the stars. “Niggers call it the Drinkin’ Gourd.”

  “Nigger is a crude word, Mr. Hilyard.”

  “The Drinkin’ Gourd… we call it the Big Dipper. Find it and follow it to the North Star.”

  “Go north and be free.” Nancy pulled the pea coat more tightly around her neck.