Halestorm

by Becky Akers

  “Smart boy.” Benjamin Tallmadge rounded the corner of the dining hall and grinned. He was one of those rambunctious students the Deacon feared who had nevertheless become a close friend. “There’s a row of pies cooling on the next street over, just waiting for us.”

  Nathan glanced sideways at him. “At Arnold’s house?”

  “Maybe.” Tallmadge shrugged. He had a score to settle with Mr. Arnold, as the whole school knew by now. Yesterday he had asked to buy hair-powder on credit at Arnold’s store, and the shopkeeper had replied with his opinion of insolvent students. Worse, three of New Haven’s fashionable young ladies had witnessed the scene. “All I know is, his sister makes the best pie in town, and she’s got a whole row of them cooling on the windowsill.”

  “We can’t just go and take his pies,” Enoch said.

  “Why not?”

  Nathan ran a hand through his hair. “I’m about to starve. Let’s go. We can always pay him.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Tallmadge said. “I don’t want to pay him.”

  “Pay who?” William Hull joined them.

  “You still talking to us, Billy?” Nathan grinned. “Way you’re all set to graduate next week, wouldn’t think you’d have time to waste on us.”

  “Think I’m stupid or something?” Hull crossed his eyes and let his jaw go slack. “Girls flock to you like bees to honey, and I go where the bees are. Wasn’t that the worst meal ever? I could cook blindfolded better than that. Say, what do I smell?”

  “Apple pie,” Nathan said. “Tallmadge thinks we ought to go help ourselves.”

  “So what are we waiting for?”

  “But it’s stealing,” Enoch said.

  “Yeah, and Arnold’s a man of integrity who’d never steal.” Tallmadge picked up a pebble and whipped it across the Yard.

  That silenced Enoch. Arnold’s thumb was often on his scales when weighing a customer’s tobacco. And there was the time Nathan had bought sealing wax, with his change coming up sixpence short. Though he had accused Arnold of nothing worse than a mistake, the man refused to make it right. “You dropped it somewheres, boy, and now you want me to pay for your carelessness. I won’t do it. Now get out of here.” What had stung more was overhearing Arnold’s words to another patron. “That’s a boy learning to be a preacher, all right—already trying to fleece the flock.”

  Had they not known where Arnold lived, their noses still would have led them to the house. Five pies lined a windowsill, their crusts browned and straining over the fruit beneath. Tallmadge was the first to hook one, though he nearly dropped it, so hot was it from baking. The others shielded their hands with their coats.

  They would have escaped but for Tallmadge’s insistence on taking all the pies. He juggled two, though carrying one was hard enough. They were loping down the street, back toward Yale, when a bellow reached them.

  “Hey! Get back here! Whaddaya think you’re doing?” Brandishing a buggy whip, Arnold raced toward them. He was a strong man of thirty, with heavy shoulders, and Enoch and Billy Hull took one look at him before dumping their loot and skipping. But Tallmadge would not relinquish his, however Nathan urged him.

  Arnold was gaining on them. Tallmadge whirled, aimed, and caught him in the chest with a pie.

  “Bull’s eye!” Nathan cheered.

  They turned to flee, but Tallmadge tripped over Hull’s pie. Nathan hauled him to his feet.

  Then Arnold was on them. His whip caught Tallmadge across the back. Tallmadge screamed, and Nathan stood aghast. He had heard that men lashed other men in the army, but he had never witnessed such savagery.

  When the shopkeeper raised his whip again, Nathan jumped him.

  They scrimmaged in the dust, Nathan beyond caring about the spectacle. He punched and scuffled and scarcely felt the blows Arnold dealt.

  Hands finally pulled them apart. The two men restraining Arnold grinned, for their tabs towered at a considerable height, as he frequently reminded them. But Timothy Dwight, Yale’s youngest tutor, was scowling as he twisted Nathan’s arm behind his back, immobilizing him. “For shame. What’s going on here?”

  “Nothing but thieves in that school of yours!” Arnold roared. “Five pies, my sister made five pies, and these rascals stole every one.”

  “That true?” Dwight released Nathan, who had ceased struggling.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who else was in this with you?”

  Nathan shook his head.

  “There’s four of them,” Arnold said. “Other one I almost caught, he’s a thin fellow, curly hair. He was in my emporium yesterday. Said his name’s Benjamin Something.”

  “Tallmadge.” Dwight could not hide his smile at Arnold’s “emporium.” “Who were the other two?”

  “One looked a lot like this one here. Could’ve been twins. You got a brother, boy?”

  Nathan stood silent, and Dwight said, “Answer him.”

  “Yes, sir. I have seven brothers.”

  “Only one’s enrolled here, though,” Dwight said and cuffed Nathan for his impudence.

  “Thank Providence for that!” Arnold cried, drawing a laugh from the onlookers. He glared at Nathan. “And he’s with you in this?”

  This time, when Nathan refused to answer, Dwight took pity on him.

  “Come, Benedict,” he said to the shopkeeper. “No man wants to tell tales on his brother. The boys look alike, and if the Hales and Tallmadge were involved, William Hull was probably along too.”

  “Fine, but I want them punished good, you hear? Tired of all the trouble I get out of you people. If they’re not in my emporium, pilfering, they’re stealing pies from my house. I’ll expect them to make good on it this time.” Benedict Arnold shook loose the men flanking him, retrieved his whip, and stalked away.

  As the onlookers dispersed, Dwight frowned at Nathan. “I thought better of you, Hale.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You tell the others I want to see them immediately.”

  “Which others, sir?”

  “Don’t play games with me. You know which others. Your brother and Hull and Tallmadge.”

  When the boys knocked at Dwight’s door, they found him and the college’s president awaiting them. The latter tapped his cane ominously against the floor, though when he saw the welt on Tallmadge’s back, where the whip had split his waistcoat, and Nathan’s black eye, he set the cane aside. He did not glance at it even when Hull pled for better food so they would not have to steal.

  The two men lectured and fined them, noting the amount on the bills sent their fathers. Any further mishap would see them expelled. But the food improved, and though it was still a poor imitation of what they enjoyed at home, they smiled triumphantly over their oyster stew and ham.

  Between lessons and stealing pies, Nathan was so busy he should have had no time to dream of Ally. He and Enoch rose with their two roommates at half past four and dressed in darkness for chapel at five, when the prayer bell rang. They had to allow time for horseplay, too. Enoch must hunt his shoes because Nathan had hidden them behind the clock down the hall, or a prankster might have coated the crown of Nathan’s hat with lampblack to leave a ring around his hair.

  But Ally ruled Nathan’s thoughts. As he studied astronomy, he named the stars that shone in her eyes. When he ought to have worked mathematical proofs, he posed his own theorems: “If Ally loves me and I love her, should my father intervene?” He dreaded reading Aristotle’s natural philosophy. Any mention of mating or bearing young covered him in sweat as he battled visions of Ally’s waist and the curves above, her ankles peeping from beneath her skirts, the legs those skirts hid....

  The happiest time of his life had been last harvest, when he realized he loved her. He had known that she idolized him, but for years, he had dismissed it as the adoration often paid older brothers. David and Joanna worshipped him with her same breathlessness. Yet that day, as she picked her way over the field, the wind had molded her clothes to her as it whipped a storm towa
rd them, and he saw not only that she carried a book in her pocket but that she was no longer a girl. He leaned on his rake to watch her, wiping his brow. Few jobs were hotter than haying, and his thirst had tormented him all morning, the more so as he had not taken time with rain threatening to run to the house or spring. Still, it was Ally he noticed, not the jug, cool, wet, that she patiently offered until he recovered the wits to take it. He gulped the cider, the sweetest ever. Finished, he stood staring at her, storm and hay forgotten. She had smiled as a woman does, and she instantly caught his meaning when he whispered her name. In her eyes glowed complete understanding, as if she read his soul and approved of everything found there. He saw how savory life with her would be, how bland without.

  One night when they had been back at school a fortnight, thoughts of Ally kept him awake though he longed for sleep. He loved her. He wanted to marry her. Graduation loomed less than a year away with his future gaping before him. Why shouldn’t he choose a wife? Why was his father opposed to something so natural?

  He had never disobeyed the Deacon and loathed hurting him. He hated to violate a pledge, however unfair. But he could not fathom why his father was determined to keep him from Ally. He remembered how the Deacon had shown no surprise at his request for her hand, how he had his “No” ready before he’d even finished asking.

  Nathan rolled out of bed, hunted his tinder-box, and lit a candle. He held his breath lest his roommates wake, but only Enoch stirred. Pulling a sheet of paper toward him, he dipped his quill in the ink. “My dearest Ally.” He wrote obliquely, for he wanted her alone to grasp that they would marry when the family passed around his letter. He sanded the page and melted wax over the candle to seal it. He would not post it yet. Such a serious matter wanted more reflection. Meanwhile, he would write Alice infrequently and dispassionately so he didn’t arouse suspicion.

  He returned to bed and slept, and when he woke before daybreak, he was smiling.

  Guy Daggett slumbered past dawn, sluggish from the rum he had shared with his uncle the night before. They’d sat before the hearth, their shadows monstrous in the firelight, with a bowl of apples on the settle beside them and his aunt’s sewing chest to hold their mugs. They talked for hours, Guy replenishing their drinks while asking about Alice Hale. “Adams,” his uncle said. “Her mother’s the Deacon’s second wife.”

  “That’s right.”

  “They was married not too long after the war. I mind how I got home from the fighting to find Elizabeth dead and all them motherless kids left behind to break your heart, even if they was Hales. It weren’t no wonder the Deacon married the Adams widow. She’s a real looker, brought some good money with her, too. She got a rich one first time around, see. That’s just like old Deacon Hale, ain’t it, after what he done to your dad over Elizabeth.” He took a long swallow of rum. “’Course, I heard the wife didn’t get much of her dead husband’s estate, that most of it went to the girls.”

  Guy wet his lips and bent forward as his uncle continued.

  “Like either of them, with their faces, need money to buy a husband. You oughter seen how fast John Hale married the oldest one, and no care for how unnatural ’tis. He’s just like his father. All them boys are. No reason not to keep all that money in the family, no sir.”

  “How much money?”

  “They’s all just as charming and conniving as can be, every last one of them Hales. Oh, I don’t know. I reckon a couple of hundred pounds.”

  A couple of hundred pounds! Alice’s beauty alone would have intrigued Guy; adding such wealth made her irresistible. Before he climbed the stairs to bed, he vowed to win her.

  When he woke this morning and dragged himself to the washstand, it took him some moments to remember why he was buoyant despite the wool in his mouth and his aching head. Then it came to him. He planned to call on the alluring Alice Adams, even though she was stepdaughter to Deacon Hale.

  Guy had grown up on tales of the Deacon and the havoc he had wreaked in his father’s life. “You ever meet a man like Hale, boy, you watch your back real careful like,” George Daggett would say in the colonial twang that embarrassed Guy before his sophisticated, macaroni friends. “That kind’ll destroy a man soon as look at him, and they do it with their fancy-fine honor and a nice, polite smile on their face. I had me a life all set—gonna marry Elizabeth Strong and get that farm of her daddy’s, and I’d have been sitting pretty. But no, old Hale comes along and blows my plans to Kingdom Come. Hope he rots in hell.”

  Deacon Hale became responsible for George Daggett’s every setback, whether in Connecticut or England. It was Hale’s fault that Elizabeth Strong had jilted him. It followed then that, but for the Deacon, George would not have met the slattern with whom he consoled himself so thoroughly her brother came after him with a brace of pistols, forcing them to marry. And it was because of Deacon Hale that the girl died of smallpox, leaving George to raise their six-year-old son. He had no proof, but George decided it was Hale who set the Sons of Liberty on him with their threat of tar and feathers unless he resigned as tax collector. He had known another officer so abused: the boiling tar blinded the man, and his flesh, burned to the bone, fell away in chunks. Though he survived, his mind was unhinged. George had sailed for England, and promptly. “I’d never sunk to collecting taxes in the first place if I’d have married Elizabeth and got the Strong farm, mind you,” he would tell Guy bitterly. He blamed Deacon Hale because they starved their first months in London, until George remembered a cousin, connected in some esoteric way to the royal court. He hounded the man with letter after letter. From this came an introduction to the owner of a gunpowder manufactory, who hired George for his knowledge of the firm’s principal market, the American colonies.

  His son Guy had adopted the wealthy Londoner’s contempt for those colonies and their fractious people. How dare this rabble, little better than savages themselves, refuse to pay their share of the last war—one fought to protect their cabins and cornfields from the French and the Indians? Taxes in England exploded as the king paid the debts on this titanic struggle. It was only logical that those most benefitted should bear the costs. Yet every time the government imposed a levy, the colonists sent a scathing petition across the Atlantic, or rioted, or boycotted British goods. Their last tantrum had nearly ruined George Daggett, now a half-owner in the powder mill.

  When his father died, leaving creditors who threatened to consume the estate and cry for more, Guy turned to the gaming table. He fancied himself a man about town and lived high, free of his father’s management. He won enough at first to keep himself well-fed and handsomely clothed, but not enough to satisfy his father’s debts. He picked up tricks from a cardsharp in exchange for sharing his room, but he lacked the man’s professionalism and restraint. His cheating was so inept that one salon after another banned him. His luck had run out, and every rook in London lined up for a share of the spoils. He welshed with great shame and no fear on his debts to gentlemen. But the sharpies terrified him, especially after they promised him a midnight swim in the Thames. The colonies he had derided began to seem a refuge.

  Only one man, an MP, was stupid enough to owe Guy a gambling debt. From him, Guy finagled a post collecting customs on the Connecticut River. Though a scant twenty pounds rattled in his pockets when he booked passage to America, Guy was jaunty, sure that his office would enrich him. Before long, he should be a gentleman of leisure again, and he had the British government to thank for that. How ridiculous that the colonials objected to such a rewarding system!

  He poured water into the washbasin and swished the ball of soap through it, working up a lather. This was stinging lye soap, homemade, not the Castile he enjoyed in London. However strong the soap, it produced weak suds. These colonials lived wretchedly, aside from a few surprising luxuries. Firewood in treeless London was exorbitant. But here, with forests growing to their doorsteps, the Americans basked before roaring hearths such as would sicken the most extravagant Englishman with their was
te. Equally amazing was the food, its abundance and variety. No hordes of filthy, emaciated beggars thronged the streets, as harassed gentlemen everywhere in London. Instead, anyone willing to sow and hoe had more than enough to eat.

  He washed his neck and torso, contemplating the morning ahead. Alice Adams’ black hair and startlingly blue eyes danced in his fantasies as he plotted his seduction. Once she wound up with his baby in her belly, he would have repaid his father’s debt to the Deacon in the matter of Elizabeth Strong. Best of all, Alice must then marry him and bring not only her beauty to his bed but her wealth as well.

  Whistling, he soaped his hair, cropped so close for sake of his wig that he seemed bald. When he had disembarked in New London a few weeks ago, the gentlemen had been as richly bewigged and powdered as he, and his macaroni finery alone had distinguished him. Yet that harbor town was so cosmopolitan no one had looked at him twice. He was drawing giggles in Coventry, however. The insufferable Nathan Hale had barely hid his laughter when they met at the Huntingtons’. Guy cursed as soapy water stung his eyes.

  He had known Nathan Hale from earliest boyhood, from the time he’d stood beside his mother in the dust of Coventry’s main road, frightened at the rigs rolling past and pulling at her skirts. She had ignored him, too busy oohing and ahhing over Elizabeth Hale’s new baby, a sickly mite named Nathan.

  That infant grew into an infuriating brat, a boy who knew every answer in school, who was clean and neat, polite to his elders, kind to his peers, one who never fidgeted in Meeting, who always had a clever remark that set everyone laughing. He wrote the most beautiful hand in Coventry, finer even than the schoolmaster’s or Rev. Huntington’s, and though the quills of the other children scratched and splattered their birchbark or the occasional, precious piece of paper, blots never spoiled Nathan Hale’s work. When the village idiot, Asher Wright, fell through the ice one winter, it was Nathan who fished him out and hustled him to the nearest hearth. What was more, Nathan insisted anyone else would have done the same when the town tried to make a hero of him. It was afterwards rumored that his parents had given him a watch, engraved and expensive, to show their pride, but no one knew for sure because he neither flaunted it nor bragged. Guy longed to grind his face in the dirt. But despite his puny beginnings, Nathan was bigger and stronger at seven than Guy was at ten. In the strapping young man who laughed at him over cake and tea, Guy saw the boy who had bested him at everything.