The Last Supper: And Other Stories

by Howard Fast

  “It could have been yesterday,” he said, and they nodded, all of them being old enough to know how time makes its way. “It could have been yesterday, and I had a place three miles from Lexington, south over east, where there used to be a stone mealy mill——” But they didn’t know the land, being New York bred, and he said, “Well, there it was anyway, and I had a rotten few acres where you broke your plough on the rocks, so when I heard that shooting begin, like frozen twigs snapping, I say to myself, there it is, Reuben, and time enough too. Here’s up and off and something doing, and I’ll leave ploughing to them as wants it. That’s what I said to myself, and I pulled on my britches. What are you up to? my wife says. What am I up to? My land, I’m up to making something and making it prime. Prime. So I took down my gun, a handsome musket of the French make, and I filled my pockets with ball and I took me a bottle of powder, and out I went—with her shouting after me that I hadn’t heard the end of it yet——” He chuckled to himself over the memory. “Hadn’t heard the end of it yet——”

  “Where you at now, Reuben?” the glass blower demanded. “You started out with Samuel.”

  “And I’ll be at him. He comes along. He comes along with that son of a bitch, John Hancock, the two of them riding hell for leather until Samuel sees me.”

  “What?”

  “Why don’t you keep your ears cocked? I told you before he came across the fresh ploughed field of Andy Simmons. Never was much of a rider, either, if the truth be told, just hanging onto the saddle and glad enough to pull up when he sees me. Come along, Hancock says to him, and Samuel answers, What do you mean, come along? This here’s an old friend of mine, Reuben Dover. Then he says to me, a good day to you, Reuben; and I say, Good morning to you, Samuel, and what was all that commotion I heard?”

  “Just like that?” the Dutch farmer grinned, slapping his knee.

  “Just like that.”

  The landlady smiled her warm smile and remarked, “I never known one yet connected with that war that wasn’t the biggest liar in the nation.”

  “All right now,” Reuben answered her patiently. “What is a lie and what ain’t a lie? Twenty-eight years ago, that was, and the man who says he remembers this and that was said, literal, why he just talks big. Nobody remembers that way, and also it’s proper a thing should ripen a little, the way a good wine does, and while it’s a ripening, you want a little coloring, the way a painter does, and that’s proper—wholly proper.”

  “Wholly proper,” the glass blower agreed. “What I seen, with summer marches and winter camps, and suffering until you wouldn’t know blood from tears, my children won’t never see—and for their kids, by God, maybe they won’t never hear of it even; for what are they saying already of old Samuel but that he was just a dirty and cantankerous old man? What we seen, it was just normal for then, but it ain’t normal for now, and you got to dress it a little.”

  “Just a little,” Reuben defended himself. “But I tell you I remember that morning just like yesterday, and when I ask what it is with all that snapping and crackling, the old man says, gunfire, lad, gunfire. It’s gone and happened, he says, and the dead are stretched out on the green grass in the most unholy way, and there’s going to be a terrible anger all over the land. That’s what he says, him who brewed the anger himself for fifteen years—And I brewed a little of it too,” Reuben nodded.

  “But he was going the other way,” the landlady reminded him.

  “Sure, and I said to him, How is it, Samuel? Well, he said, I made it, and I’m off to tell the Congress a little about it. So I asked him, You going to miss the fighting? Miss it, he says, why there’s going to be a bellyful for everyone, and I won’t miss none of it! It ain’t finishing, it’s starting. So I waved him goodby, him and Hancock—who I never liked—and I ran North and found them at the bridge.…”

  “Was you at the bridge?” the Dutch farmer asked.

  “I was. I was that,” Reuben whispered. “In at the first, and in at the last.”

  “Time for bed,” the landlady said.

  “You seen him again?” the glass blower wanted to know.

  “I never seen him again, may he rest in peace. That’s why I say, he could have died then. A man should know the proper time for packing his things and going off.”

  “A fine way to talk!” the landlady snorted. “Such a lot of talk, and where does it get to? A fine thing. Now go home—go home now,” she said to the glass blower and the Dutch farmer. She bustled around them like a big hen and then she let them out of the door. Only Reuben Dover was left, he and the cat; the cat had curled up on a warm stone of the hearth, and Reuben Dover sat with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his palms, looking at the fire. Perhaps ten minutes went by while the landlady made things fast for the night, and during that time, Reuben examined the past in the flames with a growing sadness. It was true, he reflected, that life was a moment; it came and it went, and the great treasure of youth was gone from you even before you made a full acquaintance of it. Then you filled yourself full of rum to loosen the strings that tied up your memory, but you never talked what you thought, and the rare goodness and courage of those you had known defied you. You babbled and that was all.

  By the time Reuben Dover reached Albany, he had already come to the realization that he would not continue on to Boston, that he would not stand over Samuel Adam’s grave and pay his respects, that he would not ship out in a square rigger for all the youthful and wonderful places of the world—but that he would go back to his farm and accept the scolding of his wife and the pitying looks of his children, and that he would go to church and listen to the pastor’s sermons on the Godless, and he himself would lock his own godlessness within him. He realized that youth is for the young and that youth is a land no one ever revisits. He realized that this journey upon which he had embarked so lightheartedly was a strange contradiction in itself, for more than a journey to do homage to anyone, it was a desperate and rather pathetic search for those things which had animated him so long ago; and he also realized that an old man could not solve the essence of a betrayal so enormous.

  A number of things brought him to these realizations. Only the two men he had spent that first night talking to were interested in either him or Samuel Adams. In places where he stopped to eat or sleep thereafter, he was a bore, a tiresome old man. Twice he was roundly insulted, and at Cohoes, where he announced himself a Jacobin, a glass of beer was flung in his face, and when he fought back, a blow in the head laid him out flat. At Cohoes, too, the Merchant’s Association had a Jacobin hanging in permanent effigy and now a card was put on his neck naming him Sam Adams; and after his beating, Reuben lacked the courage to tear it down and despised himself for that lack of courage. At Albany, a newspaper carried a story entitled: “An Intimate Exposure of the Frauds and Thieveries of the Late but Not Lamented Samuel Adams.” And these were just a sampling of many small but telling incidents. Yet even all of these together did not explain the bitter sadness of Reuben Dover, which he later entered in his journal in this fashion:

  “I take this opportunity (he wrote) having taken no other, of paying my own tribute to my olden Comrade, Samuel Adams, may he rest in peace and without disturbance. For I have set out on a long journey to make some gesture to him, yet never completed that journey at all. My intent was to go to Boston, but no farther came I than Albany. Never finding along the way respect or consideration for the virtues I knew and labored for, I have no heart to continue more but will return now to my home.

  “I must take note of the way this nation has changed, so that the Young are not brought up with honor for those who took the situation as it was and made from it a Revolution. Nor do citizens in the fullness of their life recall the splendid trials we endured. Rather do they embrace what was mean and narrow in the Yankee than the shining things that seem now so seldom. The honor of men who worked with their hands and their tools is now turned into dishonor, and to ask a wage for wife and child is to be called a Jacobin
. To speak a good word for old Samuel Adams, that too is termed Jacobin, and it would seem that the brave People we knew are lost to us. I do not hold that way, for many of them must be in the towns and the countryside, and I think they will rally again as they did once. But who is to call them when those of us who remember are so old? I saw in Albany the new Smelting Mill, and the men who went in there to work took their children with them, holding them by the hand. No head, it seemed, was lifted with pride. The little children walked in shame and the grown ones too. And at a Goodsmill at Shineyside, I saw the same. I saw beggars in the streets and I was stopped by hale and hearty men who whimpered that they had no work.

  “I can do honor, but what is the use if not to the living! I turned home because my part is finished and this land does not greet old men.”

  The Child and the Ship

  THE CHILD WAS THEN ELEVEN YEARS OLD, AND IF YOU must have a time, it was the, year 1733, in the town of Boston in Massachusetts Bay Colony. The ship came from the West Indies, to where she came from the old country, a dirty old bark that still could make enough money for the owners, and she came sailing into the harbor like a monster from hell.

  A bark is a three-masted sailing ship. Foremast and mainmast are square-rigged, and the mizzenmast, which is the shortest mast, at the stern of the ship, is rigged fore and aft—in other words, two booms carry a sail slung between them, and this can be swung and set any place in a full arc of a hundred and eighty degrees. This was the kind of a ship which sailed slowly and not too well into Boston harbor, and the boy saw it. Who would not see it? The boy was on Union Street, and the ship pointed north around the Long Wharf, and people ran from everywhere like crows flapping down on a cornfield. An old sailorman, Jack McKinney, an Irishman and therefore scum and dregs and dirt in that town at that time, called out to the boy: “Hey there, Sam’l, and what in hell’s name do you suppose they are running for, what they got nothing better to do, them fine folk!”

  They were fine folk too, as well as others, the merchants out of their shops in their velvet caps, and the fat ladies of quality in their little lace aprons, and the old deacons and the young apprentices. The ropewalkers and carpenters and wrights came more slowly, with a different kind of dignity.

  “There’s a vessel, there is,” young Samuel answered, proud to be singled out for an inquiry by a man as unrespectable and exciting as wicked Jack McKinney, whom he had seen at other times lying dead drunk in the gutter and again with one of the fat, toothless prostitutes who were such a disgrace and plague to the town. Now they stood where there was a break in the houses and a narrow run of vision down to the bay, and the boy saw the ship framed there an instant. He had grown up on terms with ships of every sort. “Stinking old bark, she is,” he said. They were already part of the drift to the waterfront. “Bad language makes for a bad one, now, young Sam’l. It ain’t fitting.” Samuel said, “No, sir, Mr. McKinney, but there is something funny about her.” Then, when they came past the hogpens where Faneuil Hall would be raised up seven years later, the child saw what was funny about her. They crossed Merchant’s Row, and there was the bark standing in drunkenly, with the fore and aft booms swinging loose and crazy, and with a little boy—and no older than this child, Samuel Adams—hanging from the upper one. And from the yardarms of the two forward masts, four other men hung, their bodies swollen and ugly and torn where the birds had fed upon them.

  Boston of that time was a hard city, and in her there were some hard men, and what else would you expect from a place that had scrabbled its own bed out of the wilderness only a century before, with no guarantee to anyone except the odds that he would die under thirty? But if she was hard, she wasn’t hard enough to see this unmoved, and there was a lot of vomit cast up by people who saw that child’s body swinging back and forth like the pendulum of a clock. The child Samuel Adams pressed close to the sailorman Jack McKinney, who folded his big horny hand around the boy’s little one, holding the lad close beside him and protectively, but not sufficiently the master of his own curiosity to turn away—as was no one else either.

  And the bark moved in as the crowd of people gathered on the dockside to watch her. Many a small boat pushed toward her, but you could see that these bumboat peddlers and bottom fishermen had no urgent desire to get onto that dirty old ship, so reeking with death, even though there were those on board who were alive. Now the people on shoreside could see them, the helmsman on the stern deck, the captain beside him, the sailors sullenly—and that was plain from every movement they made—and poorly working the ropes and canvas, some passengers in their shore clothes close together on top the midship housing.

  “Why that’s the Larkspur,” someone said, and everyone agreed and wondered why they had not recognized her before.

  “And that’s old Ebnezer Saxon,” someone else said, pointing to the captain, “by God, it is, the wicked old sinner.” “And more to answer for too, and many a day to spend in church before he makes God or the citizens forgive this,” another said. But still another said, “What happens on the high seas is not what happens on the hard earth, before you make judgment.” But many made their judgment just looking at the child’s form.

  His Majesty’s customs palavers with ghosts, if the need warrants, and they ran out and stood under her side. Captain Hixby went up and spoke to Captain Saxon of the Larkspur, and those with good eyes—and young Samuel’s were very good indeed—could see the vigor with which Captain Saxon pounded one fist into the other palm, and they could also see the obedient nods of Hixby. The Larkspur had no motion now, just lying broadside to the shore and not too far off, making for Samuel and everyone else a convenient stage for drama. Thus Samuel, all sick and shaky and terrified and excited, saw how the customs man pointed at the little boy’s body, and how Captain Hixby pointed at it too, nodded his head and then pointing from one to another of the sullen seamen, and then calling to one of the passengers who came down from the housing and joined them. Then the three spoke, Hixby pounding palm with fist again and the customs man uneasily pulling at his lower lip and scraping wax from his ear, and the passenger judicial and sober.

  Then young Samuel began to cry, and McKinney, moved by a sudden tenderness, gathered the boy up in his arms and carried him away to a little inn by the Old South Church, where he bought him a small beer and talked to him soothingly. For McKinney did not have, to see any more. He knew the story, all of it, and what detail he was not aware of would be supplied him a hundred times over for many weeks to come. And anyway it was a commonplace story, and some, sense, some strange intuition, told the Irishman that this was no commonplace boy at all.

  “But why did they want to kill the lad?” Samuel asked him. “Will they kill me?” he added anxiously.

  “If you did what the lad did, Sammy, why sure and make no mistake.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Ah now—and that’s still a matter of conjecture.” The Irishman had a large, long, bony face. Samuel could see how tight the skin stretched over the bones, weather-beaten skin that was traced over with the red finery of broken capillaries and made a nest of wrinkles for each of the little pale blue eyes, a hard, savage face he had always thought when he was somewhat afraid of Jack McKinney; which he was not now, but rather warm inside with the small beer which he had never tasted before. Perhaps a little drunk too, which was the sin of the old sailorman. Now Jack McKinney stroked his head and answered gently, “But I conjecture pretty good, huh, Sammy, I tell you, Sam’l, you ask a pretty deep question, all right, when you ask what he did. He did wrong, Sammy. Wrong for you? Now what is right and what is wrong for you, just a shaver and never out of Boston, which is just a bit of a town and would never be noticed even a mite in one of the old countries. Wrong for me? Well, now, I’m an old evil one, and going to burn my fill too, Sammy, for what there ain’t no redemption, none at all, considering the sin I sinned. But, you know, Sammy, sometimes I say to myself, maybe I never sinned no sin what I would call it. But I don’t know,
Sam’l, and that’s the round world of it. And how shall I say that the little lad, God rest his soul, did wrong. I ain’t no preacher, am I, Sammy? Come along—let me see a smile out of you.”

  “You ain’t no preacher, no,” Samuel said, smiling.

  “And don’t you go home and tell your bonny mother I fed you small beer, or every cursed Christian in this town will have the whipping of me, and me in the stocks soon after too.”

  “Are you no Christian then?” Samuel asked.

  “Hah!” The Irishman drank deeply of his beer, smacked his lips, and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt. “Tastes good, Sammy, and calls to mind too the hot days I spent in the stocks of this same cursed town. For what? For not being no Christian, so they give me Christian treatment, thirty or fifty hours in the stocks with never a spot of water, never saying beer, to wet my poor cracked lips and my poor swollen tongue. Ah, it is a hell of a life that a sailing man lives, Sam’l, with a dry mouth on shore and a dry mouth on sea too, where all is water. Now what is a Christian, Sammy?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Do I know? That ain’t the point, Sammy. Do you know? A good Christian, I tell you, is Captain Saxon of the Larkspur, him that hanged a little lad from the boom’ for the birds to eat! In this town, it is a blue-nosed Puritan what’s a Christian, begging your pardon, Sammy. So I ain’t no Christian, am I? Only fit to put away in stock if I have a wee little bit too much. But the mother and father of me was Roman, Sammy, which even I ain’t, since I was never confessed or given the Sacrament these twenty years. No. I am no Christian, Sammy, and I don’t lose no sleep over it. I will burn in hell properly, and maybe a fine, good lad like you will say a prayer for me, a candle being not permitted in that dry barn you call a church. But I tell you this, Sammy, there will be some fine folk burning with me.…”