Cape Cod

by William Martin

  Beneath it were drawings of the surfboat riding a wave, the breeches buoy, and most touching of all, the body of a white-haired Negro on a horse cart, and his son removing the axe from his belt. The caption read, “A Father’s Final Gift.” The engravers had given the son more Negroid features than Tom had. Their vision of Samuel Isaac Nance had huge lips, rolling eyes, torn trousers, and looked more like a character from Uncle Remus than a brave seaman.

  The relationship between Tom’s parents and the dead cook Jacob Nance never came to light. The New York writer interviewed the lifesavers, but the survivors had shipped back to Nova Scotia—except for Samuel Isaac Nance himself.

  Had anyone bothered to ask, he could have told the story of his parents’ flight in 1850, though he knew nothing of his father’s brief desertion. A reporter might then have asked if the Hilyards who saved his parents were related to the one who saved him, and the story would have become the sensation of 1885. But no one asked and Samuel Isaac Nance did not read Frank Leslie’s Illustrated.

  When the story appeared, Nance was aboard a Province-town Grand Banker. He had chosen not to return to Nova Scotia and the backers who believed the Dorothea N. was insured. He had also fallen for the daughter of a Portuguese fishing captain and hoped that, with his light skin and blue eyes, he might pass for something he was not.

  For his part, Tom Hilyard remembered the tale of his mother’s first slave run, but he had never been told of its sad conclusion or the name the slaves had taken. Besides, a new career awaited him, and he began to draw everything he saw for the illustrated weeklies.

  But the weeklies didn’t need everything he saw. They had photographers who could take their new lightweight Eastman cameras anywhere, make their pictures, then pass them on to staff engravers who rendered photographic truth in line. So Tom took his savings, his broken foot, his palette of oils, and moved to the old house on Billingsgate… and he painted.

  He filled hundreds of canvases. In winter he took the train to Boston to see the works of the masters and the wonders of the French school called Impressionism. In summer he went to Provincetown to meet the men of the Boston Paint and Clay Club. He called himself an American Impressionist and painted some more, but no one noticed.

  “Progress passes me by,” he told his aunt Ruth on a Thanksgiving visit two years later. “I see with paint and pencil. The world prefers chemicals and photographic plates.”

  “Pr-pr-progress cannot be st-st-stopped, Tom.” Her hands worked steadily at the squash on the cutting board. A black stove sat in the hearth and the stovepipe ran up the flue. Heat and good smells steamed the windows.

  Ruth was now eighty-one, and her eyes seemed to gaze toward ever more distant horizons. Of course, to Tom, she had aged little since his return from the war. She had been as lined and gray at fifty-eight, as concerned with the neatness of the house, as obsessed with the long strands of hair she was always shaping, the braids of the children she never had.

  “Can’t be stopped,” repeated Tom sadly.

  “So you d-d-d-do things to move ahead. Find yourself a good w-w-w-woman and switch to engraving.”

  Tom scratched out the sketch he had made of her. She always mentioned women when they talked. She could not understand that some men had no desire for them and denied whatever other desires they might have. But she meant well, and she was the only one who had ever loved him. He began to sketch her again.

  “Y-y-you don’t want to grow old alone. I was lucky. I always had Ephraim and his family over on Nauseiput Creek. ’Course, his sons have notions of their own.”

  Some Cape Cod brothers were as close as clams in a flat. Others were like high tide and low.

  Ephraim’s older son, Zachary Hilyard, took after his late father, a big, slow, calculating kind of man who counted himself blessed at having Jack’s Island to live on and a fine wife to bear him children. He tilled the soil and worked the weirs, wore a fringe of whiskers around his face and held up his trousers with honest red braces.

  His younger brother, Elwood, taller and pencil-thin, had chosen to shape his beard and his passions to the future. He wore a neat Vandyke and a gray four-button suit, favored silk cravats, and always wore a monocle when he visited Boston’s mansions.

  Of course, at Boston’s mansions, he always went to the back door, because this fine figure of a man was a peddler. He sold the latest buttonhooks and cheese graters and carried an ample supply of basics like sewing thread and gas mantles, too. On Cape Cod, his visit had been the highlight of a woman’s week. In Boston, sales were tougher, but tougher sales made tougher salesmen, and he said that with a new century gallivanting toward them, those who could sell, not those who could cut the eyes from scallops, would thrive.

  He always came to Thanksgiving with a bottle of French wine from S. S. Pierce on Tremont Street… and an idea. It took him most of the meal to get around to his latest idea. Long after they had all given thanks and wondered about their ancestors, Tom mentioned progress. Elwood jumped right in.

  “It’s a good thing, progress. If you’ve seen the world, like I have, you agree. And I don’t say that to be a braggadoccio.” Along with his Edwardian wardrobe, Elwood favored inflated words and foreign phrases.

  “I like the progress from one season to the next,” said Zachary. “It suited the ancestors we honor today. It’ll suit our children.”

  Elwood turned to Ruthie, perhaps in the knowledge that the aged were the best allies of youthful enthusiasm. “What would you say, Auntie, to a hotel on Nauseiput Creek?”

  “A-a-a-”

  “Hotel?” shouted Zachary. “On my island?”

  “Our island.” Elwood blew on his Indian pudding. “Yours, mine, and Aunt Ruthie’s.”

  “And the Bigelows’, too,” added Tom.

  “A ho-ho-ho-”

  “They live on the other side. It’s none of their business.”

  “They can damn quick make it their business.” Zachary pushed his son’s fingers away from the Indian pudding.

  Tom slipped out the sketch pad and began to draw the face of Elwood P. Hilyard. He liked the way the enthusiasm brightened Elwood’s eyes. Enthusiasm was something most Cape Codders kept to a minimum. Elwood fairly dripped with it. He had been to the city.

  Tom asked, “Why a hotel?”

  “Why not? They’ve built them in Hyannis, in Dennis. Lorenzo Dow Baker put up a veritable Tajma Hall in Well-fleet.”

  “Where do you plan to build this?” asked Tom.

  “Where Pa’s house is now.”

  Zachary grew very still. “That’s my house.”

  “It’s the best spot, Zach, and you’ll have a market for what you grow and catch. And your little ones will get to know quality people.”

  “Hote-hote-hote-hotel?” shouted Ruth.

  “Yes, Ruth.”

  “I like it.”

  She liked it enough to change her will. When she passed away in 1890, she bequeathed the Hilyard property on Billingsgate to her nephew Tom so that he could paint in solitude, her Jack’s Island property to Elwood, her hair wreaths and $229.97 in savings to Zachary.

  “This bequest may disappoint Zachary,” the will stated, “as he shall own only one-fourth of the Hilyard parcel. But if he will transfer to Elwood his one-fourth and allow the hotel to be built upon it, he shall receive all of my personal property and Elwood’s bequest. I believe this life is nothing unless we make things to leave behind. This agreement needs only the assent of Zachary to become binding.” With some reluctance, Zachary assented.

  “Hotel? On Jack’s Island?” Heman Bigelow’s voice echoed off the oak tellers’ windows of his bank. Shipmasters’ widows and frugal scallop fishermen stopped in the middle of their transactions.

  Elwood P. Hilyard put his monocle into his eye and lowered his voice. “That’s not the tonality I was hoping to hear from the president of the First Comers Cooperative.”

  “I moved to Jack’s Island for peace and quiet… and good gunnin’. Not many plac
es where a man can roll out of bed and into the duck blind.”

  “This could be a fine place to put Cape Cod money.”

  “I’ve done more than anyone to keep Cape Cod money workin’ since the Civil War, sonny. I need no lectures on how to use what these fine people have put in my trust”—he pointed an arthritic old finger at the faces of his customers beyond the gate—“and I didn’t move to Jack’s Island to see a hotel scare off all the ducks!”

  Elwood looked at the carriages and carts clopping past the Harwich town green. It was a bright day in March 1891. The sun poured down through the bare trees, as though scrubbing the world clean for spring. He took off his monocle, polished it, and looked hard at Heman Bigelow’s spectacles. “You lent Levi Snow a substantiated sum to build his inn last summer, right here in Harwichport.”

  “The word is substantial, you fool. He’s a man of substance. You’re nothin’ more than a peddler, with pretensions. And what’s wrong with your left eye? Why don’t you wear spectacles like everybody else?”

  Elwood stood and tugged on the points of his vest. “There are other lenders.”

  “But no other neighbors. You try to build a hotel on that island, you’ll have to get ’round me. Good afternoon.” He-man swiveled his big oak chair and looked at the painting behind him, an enormous print of Boughton’s Pilgrims Going to Church. Copies hung in all the offices of First Comers Cooperative, to remind the customers of just who was granting them their loans.

  Elwood tried not to look at the faces of the other customers, but before he reached the door, he heard the voice of Widow Sears: “Say, we need one of them newfangled can openers. You sellin’ ’em these days?”

  A few hours later Heman’s son Charles rose from his chair. “A hotel! On Jack’s Island?”

  Heman had taken the afternoon train to Barnstable and gone straight to the 1700 house, Hannah’s runaway stop. There his son Charles now kept a law office. “Every generation, they come up with somethin’ to bother us. I’m too old to have strangers sneakin’ around my duck blind. Ignorant swamp Yankees!”

  “At least they’re Cape Codders. Maybe they’ll listen to reason.”

  The next day Charles Bigelow, Esq., rode the train to Wellfleet, a journey of almost forty miles that took not much more than an hour. Progress was a magnificent thing.

  Yet the miseries of travel on Cape Cod—rolling packet runs and spine-pounding coach rides—had protected it before the coming of the trains. Charles recalled that, in his boyhood, there were almost no strangers in Barnstable. Contentious people, to be certain, but the faces you saw at town meeting, at church, at the wharf, had been there from the beginning. American faces they were, English faces, the stock that had founded a nation.

  Now there were bravas arriving on the whalers and fishing boats. Negroes had been intermarrying with Indians in Mash-pee since before the Underground Railroad. Portagees were taking over the Provincetown fishing fleet. And the papist Irish, who bred like rabbits and voted with one mind, were slowly moving into Barnstable County. The train that rocked Bigelow through the pine groves, across the winter-burned bogs, and over the open wastes of Eastham now brought strangers from every point of the compass. A hotel would only bring more. Perhaps an artist might object to a hotel on his ancestral island.

  “Nope,” said Tom Hilyard. “Did at the beginning, but that was before I thought about it.”

  Bigelow sat in the ancient cottage at Billingsgate, in a shaft of sunlight from one of the south windows. Unlike his father, he had a full head of hair and features that were large and expansive rather than hard and precise, a Saint Bernard to his father’s terrier. His widening paunch and gold watch fob looked distinctly out of place among Tom Hilyard’s stick furnishings.

  “Rembrandt and the Dutch preferred the north light. Cool, indirect. I like Cape light. It reflects off beach and the sea, seems to come from everywhere.” Tom mixed gold and brown and spread the oil across the canvas. “This is Thoreau.”

  “He wouldn’t have liked another hotel.”

  “He came here when there were forty thousand people. Now there’s less than thirty. What with the end of shippin’ and salt makin’ and such, the Cape’s shrivelin’ up. Young folks are movin’ off.” Tom limped back and forth before the canvas. A little blue, a little more gold. A little bird flying over Thoreau. “A hotel would bring folks in.”

  “Cooks and maids and porters. Off-Cape immigrants, taking work from our own.” Bigelow came over to the canvas and pretended to study Tom’s technique. “I’ve bought some of your paintings. They’re excellent.”

  Tom had grown hard doing a job where “well done” meant a life saved and seldom less. But there had been few compliments for his painting. “What have you collected?”

  “Sunset at Nauseiput, Jack’s Island Clam Diggers—”

  “I’d been studyin’ Millet before Clam Diggers.”

  “It shows,” said Bigelow, though he hadn’t the foggiest idea who Millet was. “Jack’s Island clam diggers. That’s how the banks think of the Hilyards, Tom, rightly or wrongly. Not many banks lendin’ money to clam diggers. Tell your cousin that. Tell him, so he doesn’t waste his time.”

  And Tom did. Nevertheless, Elwood wasted his time until every Cape Cod bank had proven the Bigelows prophetic. Then he went back to peddling and dreaming. Zachary fished, raked clams, impregnated his wife. And out on Billingsgate, Tom painted Cape landscapes and scenes of Cape life. He sold them to friends and businesses. He sold them in shavings shops, beside whittled windmills and hand-carved weathervanes that visitors bought to remind them of Cape Cod. He sold them wherever he could.

  But soon his friends had all the art they could hang, and summer visitors were as fickle as April winds. It was not too many years before Tom could no longer support himself with his painting. So Zachary—steady, stolid Zachary—came each week with fish. Elwood, wandering Massachusetts in his four-button suits, butterfly collars, and peddler’s pack, could send only letters about his hotel, his turreted, gabled, flag-festooned dream.

  Finally, on a June day in 1896, Tom came to the bottom rung of artists’ hell. He ran out of paint. He still had canvas, paper, and when all else failed, scavenged cedar shingles to paint upon. But he had no paint.

  And he had to paint. If he did not, he would come to meditate on his loneliness, on the pain in his foot, on the impulses he had denied since the day at Cold Harbor, on his inability to create anything to remain after him. Every morning, when he looked at the play of light upon the water, he wanted to give permanence to the ineffable beauty of it. But if he had no paint…

  Or was it inspiration that he lacked? Weren’t sea and sky inspiration enough? Could it be that he lacked talent?

  They said the Indians had made paint from berries, from animal blood, from bark and squid ink and seaweed…. Tom ground pigments with mortar and pestle and created watercolors to keep painting. He painted the tide flats with a seaweed paint because tide flats were a muddy green. He painted an ocean with blueberry-based paint and created a blueberry-colored ocean.

  He prayed for a stranding, so that he could make paint from whale oil. But no whales came. So he tried to make new paint from old paint and simply made a mess. He took a piece of red cloth and soaked the color out of it, then he painted with the pink water, which faded on the paper.

  One gentle June evening, he sat in the little cottage, soaked his foot in hot water, and read a newspaper he had found blowing along the beach, dated May 5, 1896:

  Barnstable attorney Charles Bigelow, a Republican, has announced his intention to run for the State Senate. He says it is time to return to the values of hard work, honesty, and good Protestant faith that founded this country.

  Said Bigelow: “I believe that my Pilgrim ancestors would agree, if they could come to the Cape today, that she is changing. It will be the job of the next state senator to see that the change is for the better in the birthplace of America.

  Tom cursed. If he’d had something to
drink, he would have drunk. He and his beloved Jack had fought a war to prove that all men were created equal. Now men like Charles Bigelow waved the flag of nativism, when in simple truth, they hated outsiders. And hadn’t they all been outsiders once? Tom dried his foot on the old newspaper, then threw it into the kettle of water and wondered if he could make paint from newsprint.

  Then he put his head back and studied the evening light filling his room. The light was his friend, and the light of the summer sunset seemed as certainly alive as the terns darting across the tide flats. And on June evenings, the red light reached deeper into the room than at any other time of the year, so that its rays met the red of the fireplace bricks, creating a color that Tom Hilyard yearned to paint. And perhaps it was a color he could turn into paint.

  He got out a hammer and chisel. He placed the chisel on the corner of the fireplace and made a single, gentle tap. To his surprise, the whole brick popped free, as though the mortar had been weakened… or perhaps replaced.

  Behind it should have been another course of brick, but instead, there was a piece of metal. He tapped it with his hammer. It sounded hollow. He tapped a few more bricks, and the mortar around them crumbled like sand. He pulled them out, so that the shaft of red sunlight now illuminated a box in a little space inside the chimney.

  At first, Tom was merely curious. An iron box? With the initials TW in the corner? A strange house this was, with surprises everywhere.

  He recalled the broken-off barrel of the blunderbuss that he had found behind a wall. It had contained a dozen ranting broadsides, antiques of Revolution and a long-lived family feud. He had dried them in the sun, read them, and painted a woman in tar and feathers.

  What surprise might this box contain? He peeled away the wax seal and pried off the top with a knife. He pulled out a thin brown notebook on which was written the name Lemuel Bellamy in different scripts. Beneath was a thicker book, like a ledger. “Log of the Dragon. Southampton, June 21, 1808. Have taken a large load of lumber, which will show on manifest. Have also taken aboard Morley Milt and his crew of ‘Africa hands.’ Milt will use the lumber to build three new decks into the Dragon while we make for Africa. This is not a proud day, but my grandmother yearned for the book of history, and now it is mine.”