Citizen Tom Paine

by Howard Fast

  And Gabreou, rising, sneered, “Citizen Paine, I presume, talks as an Englishman?”

  There was one spark left; groping to his feet, Paine whispered, “Ask that of the dead, not of the living. Ask the people of three nations whether Paine ever spoke other than for humanity.”

  And Bonaparte said, “That is enough, Monsieur Paine.”

  15

  “BUT NO MAN KNOWETH OF HIS SEPULCHRE …”

  IT WAS a long passage, but not a bad one; even for the time, it was long, fifty-four days now and still no landfall. The experienced travelers said, no, that was nothing at all; a bad voyage was a hundred days; ships were better now in this year of 1802; you didn’t call a voyage bad until the drinking water went bad, and, God willing, there would be a landfall tomorrow’s dawn.

  Tomorrow’s dawn found half the passengers clustered on the foredeck, each wanting to have first sight of the good, green country called America; and the same thing happened on the next day and the next, each time more passengers crowding the dipping prow until at last land was sighted.

  Among the passengers was the old man, Paine, standing silently at the rail, peering ahead, trembling a little, and nodding when the captain said, in a rich, down-east twang:

  “Looks good, the old country, aye, Mr. Paine?”

  “Yes—”

  “A leetle bit changed, but not so much that you won’t recognize it.”

  “It’s been a long time.”

  “Well, that’s the way. A man may have an itch to travel, but he’s mighty glad to get home in the end.” Above, they were making sail, and as a loose rope whipped by, the captain roared up, “Look lively there, you confounded lubbers!” And then to Paine, “We’ll make Baltimore close enough, just a day or two. You’ll be going on to Washington?”

  “I had planned to,” Paine nodded. His voice was somewhat hesitant as he said, “I will want to see my old friend, Mr. Jefferson. It’s been a long time—”

  “There you are,” the captain laughed, raising his voice enough to make sure that those standing by overheard him talking so familiarly with a friend of the President of the United States. Privately, he had little enough sympathy with this old rascal, although Paine was in no way so repulsive as he had been pictured. He was said to be the enemy of Christianity. The captain was a religious man and didn’t hold with that sort of thing, but still it never hurt to put in the right word at the right place.

  “There you are,” he laughed. “I go home to the missus, and you go off to dinner with the president.”

  And it was time enough, Paine thought to himself, that he had come home. A man wants to die in a friendly place; he wants to have a friend or two about him. The world is too big—a man wants to have just a little corner of it when he’s old and tired. They might hate him, laugh at him, abuse him everywhere else on earth; but America would not forget. The times that tried men’s souls were not so long ago that they should have any real reason for forgetfulness. Washington was dead, but most of the others were still alive. They would remember old Common Sense.

  They hadn’t wanted much to do with him on shipboard, and that was just as well; break clean; his work was done. Napoleon was the master of Europe, and all Paine wanted now was to go home and forget.

  He came into the president’s house, and the colored doorman announced, “Mr. Paine to see the president,” and it was too much a dream. He felt like an old man in front of Tom Jefferson, although there was only six years’ difference in their ages; Paine felt used up and purposeless before the tall, straight, handsome person who was President of the United States. Jefferson was at the height of his power and glory; the second phase of the revolution, they called it when he won the election, the dawn of the day of the common man. And Paine was used up and finished.

  But Jefferson, striding forward, offering his hand and smiling, said, “Tom, Tom, you’re a sight for old eyes. So the wars are over, and you’ve come home! It’s the turn of the wheel, Tom; it’s a sign that fortune is smiling when old comrades come together again.”

  Paine could say nothing; he smiled and then he began to cry, and then Jefferson was tactful enough to leave him alone. The old man sat in the reception room of the new presidential house, crying maudlin tears, taking snuff with a trembling hand, and then crying again.

  He was all right when Jefferson came back; he was wandering through the two front rooms, peering at the old furniture and standing back to look at the oil portraits of men he had once known and fought by.

  “It’s new,” Jefferson explained. “The whole city is new. I like to think that someday it will be one of the great capitals of the world.”

  “It will be,” Paine said solemnly.

  “You’ll stay for dinner, of course?”

  “The president is a busy man—”

  “That’s nonsense, and you’ll stay for dinner, Tom. We have a lot to talk about.”

  Paine was eager to stay. All during the trip across, he had been speculating upon how Jefferson would welcome him. Even now the two Toms were grouped together as the world’s foremost democrats, and it would be strange indeed if there was not some place for him in the Jefferson administration, even a very small place, such as secretary to the British or French legation, or perhaps one of the lesser cabinet ministers. That would be better, for it would permit him to spend his last years in America, and how could Jefferson evade the responsibility? Didn’t he show immediately that he remembered the old times? A little work, a little honor, a little respect, and he would be able to die content.

  It was good to be home.

  At dinner, Jefferson beat all around the subject before he came directly to it. Talking about old times, he picked up one memory after another, and it soon became apparent to Paine that he was handling them uneasily; Jefferson was not a man to play hob with his own conscience; he lived by words and ideals, not by actions. He said to Paine:

  “It’s not that we ever differed. Our ends were always the same.”

  And Paine, eagerly, “That was a consolation in the worst times. If things were black, they were never so black but that I was able to tell myself, There’s one man in the world who understands and believes.”

  When coffee and brandy were served, Jefferson shifted the conversation to Paine’s experiences in Europe. But the old man was not anxious to bring back memories of a great hope that had died. It seemed incredibly banal of the president to ask so curiously of those gallant men who had gone forth from the Luxembourg to meet their deaths, Clootz, Danton, Condorcet. Of Marat’s murder by Charlotte Corday, Paine would say nothing at all.

  “Done with,” he shrugged. “Now it’s Napoleon. There’s nothing of the republic left.”

  “And will the French support him? I can hardly believe that.”

  “They’ll support him. They are good people, but now the whole world is ranged against them. What else can they do?”

  “I gather you intend to devote yourself to writing,” Jefferson said, and could not help, adding, “The administration will be glad for your support.”

  “One does not make revolutions at my age,” Paine smiled.

  “No—no, naturally. A long life, well filled, a battle well fought, you might say. So much of what we have, we owe to you; so much of what was done, Paine did. And now a comfortable old age.”

  “Old age?”

  “Only in a manner of speaking. We are none of us so young as we were, Thomas.”

  Holding out a hand that trembled in spite of himself, Paine said defensively, “The machine runs down, but my mind isn’t old. Did they accuse Franklin of being an old man? I have no family—”

  “The farm?” Jefferson speculated, referring to the piece of property at New Rochelle that Congress had granted Paine after the war.

  “I’m not a farmer. A man wants work, he doesn’t want to be laid on the shelf like a piece of old goods.” That was as near as he could come to asking Jefferson. Well, he understood a little of what the president was thinking, but an
old man becomes irritable, wrapped up in the few years that are left to him. Jefferson stared moodily at the backs of his hands and said words to the effect of a president not being his own master, of a new, democratic administration having to start with an uphill fight, of a political alignment that was most complicated. He would never want anything to come between him and Paine; they were too much old, good friends for misunderstanding.

  “I see,” Paine nodded.

  Jefferson said morosely, “You will find you have your enemies here, Thomas. The letter you addressed to Washington—”

  “I won’t talk of him,” Paine growled.

  “No, I’m not condoning him. But understand his position, nursing a babe of a state, in no way united, England prodding us and prodding us, and all of us knowing that another war would destroy us. You were in France—”

  “Waiting for the guillotine!”

  “I know, Thomas. But Washington was a strange man, not brilliant, not discerning; his heart was hurt, and there was a layer of rock over it. You think of the glory and the shouting, but what was that to a man who never in his life had anything he really wanted? He saw his duty, and he tried to perform it—”

  “Even if it meant condemning me to death.”

  “Even if it meant that,” Jefferson admitted.

  There was a while of silence, and then the president mentioned The Age of Reason. He pointed out that the whole administration had been attacked as atheistic. Paine was tired now; seeing how things were, he wanted to get it over with and go.

  “If you were to enter the government,” Jefferson finally added, “it would be just the wedge our enemies are seeking.”

  Paine smiled and nodded.

  “Perhaps in a year or two,” Jefferson said.

  In a hotel: “Paine? This is a godly house. We want no part of Paine.”

  In the street: “There goes the old beast.”

  In a tavern: “Drink with the devil, boys. Antichrist is here!”

  And the children, flinging mud and rocks: “Damned old devil! Damned old devil!”

  A woman: “You filthy old beast—you filthy, filthy old beast!”

  A crowd: “A rope and a tree, and let’s get it over with!”

  Paine was home.

  He went to visit his old friend Kirkbride at Bordentown. Kirkbride had written that he would be happy—most happy—to see Paine, and when Paine had speculated that perhaps a visit there would do harm to Kirkbride’s reputation, Kirkbride waved the objection aside and begged him to come. Paine still owned the small piece of property at Bordentown, and of late a new, tremulous fear of poverty had taken hold of him. He thought he would look the land over and see whether it was worth selling.

  It was good to be back in Bordentown. Word had gone about the Jersey countryside that Paine would be at Kirkbride’s, and any plans the people might have had for abuse and demonstration were nipped when a dozen veterans gathered to pay their respects to their old comrade. Not the leaders, these, not politicians, but brown-skinned dirt farmers, light-eyed, slow-speaking men in their forties and fifties and sixties who had not flown high enough to leave all their memories behind them. Religious, they were, but not so religious that they excluded belief in God and men from their creed.

  Gathered in a half-circle around the roaring fire, they paid a drawling tribute to their friend, and they gave Paine the last evening he would want to remember. Speech was slow and hard in coming to these men; their farms far apart, such gatherings were a rare occasion, and it took a good many rounds of old-fashioned flip before their tongues were loosened. Then, like careful masons, treasuring cement in a land where no more mortar could be had, they re-created scene after scene, passing the telling of a tale from one to another, not jealously but calculatingly, as one does with a good thing. They recalled the composition of the first Crisis paper, lingering over such details as the drum Paine had used as a desk.

  “Pot-bellied—”

  “Rib drum, I think.”

  “Now reckon it out, that was a right fancy drum with brass fittings. Johnny Hopper’s, it was.” They passed on to talk about how Johnny Hopper, the little drummer boy, had died at Brandywine, aged sixteen. “Poor damned little tyke.” Then, from him, one old face after another was brought back. It shocked Paine to know how many were dead. Had a whole era, a whole age passed away? It was a roll-call from beyond the grave, Greene, Roberdeau, Putnam, Hamilton, name after name. “Disbanded,” someone said.

  But for all the talk of what had been and was no more, it was a good night for Paine, a sweet, warm night, a night to be remembered on such an occasion when as later, after leaving Bordentown, he passed through Trenton on his way to New York and changed coaches there. He never concealed his identity; he was Mr. Paine, and proud of it, but the pick-up coach driver told him:

  “Damned if you’ll ride in my stage.”

  At which Paine bowed his head and said quietly, “Very well, I’ll wait for the next.”

  Between coaches, a gang of teen-age hoodlums gathered. It was amusing to kick the old man’s luggage around, and then to clout him over the back with a stick or a lump of mud when he went to get it. And the best part of it was that grown folks stood about and laughed and cried, “Go to it! Give the old devil what he deserves!” Better fun to spit in his face as he lost his temper, to jolt him with hip or shoulder, to dance just out of his reach, screaming, “There ain’t no God! Paine says so! There ain’t no God!” Best fun of all when Jed Higgens tripped him and sent him face down in the mud; and then, while he lay there, whimpering like the old coward he was, Jed opened his grip, threw out half the clothes, and stuffed it with the empty whisky bottles that littered the station.

  It might have gone on for a pleasurable long time, had not Mark Freeburg come along. Mark had only one arm; he had lost the other in the war, but the one was strong enough to send the young blades running and help the old man to his feet.

  He stayed a while in New York, before going on to the farm at New Rochelle. His side was troubling him again, and his hands trembled worse than ever. He didn’t mind discomfort in other parts of his body, but if he could not control his hands, how could he write? And writing was the only thing left to him. In addition to that, the long arm of Napoleon reached across the Atlantic and touched him. Bonneville was in trouble with the new government; his paper had closed down, and he was afraid for his wife and children. Now he could not leave the country himself, but couldn’t Paine make some provision for Madame Bonneville and the children? Perhaps she could keep house for Paine? In France, under Napoleon, there was nothing left for a man who loved freedom, and it was said that Paine was a great man in America—

  Yes, Paine wrote, he would do something.

  So to add to other things, there was a woman and three small children on his hands.

  It was all much too involved for him; his head ached with the strain of it, so many things to do, so many matters to attend to. Jefferson was running for the presidency again, and Paine, after a pet of childish rage, fought the issue out with himself and decided to support the president. Writing articles and pleas—but his hands shook so. Then the Bonnevilles came, and he shipped them off to the place in Borden-town. Too old to be bothered with children. He would forget something, and then walk round and round his little New York room, trying to recall what he had forgotten, and then go out into the street in slippers and dressing-gown, realizing what he had done only when the laughter and jeers of people woke him to it. There were the fits of depression when the brandy bottle was his only solace, and he drank until the glass slipped from his trembling fingers.

  Then Madame Bonneville returned from Bordentown, bored, after so many years in Paris, by life in a rustic village where no one could speak a word of French. She took rooms in New York, and when Paine protested that after all he had given her a house, and that he was not wealthy enough to pay for an apartment too, she said:

  “And who took care of you in Paris?”

  He was old enough
to be bullied now; he wanted peace; he was not too certain in his mind any more about what debts he owed to what people.

  He tried to live alone on the New Rochelle place, but it was peopled with ghosts. When he lit a fire at night, to the accompaniment of brightly beating drums and shrill fifes, the past came marching out of the flames, ragged continentals with their long firelocks over their shoulders, shouting forlornly, Hello there, old Common Sense! It was more than he could stand; he didn’t want memories. He flung dishes at them and begged them, “Leave me alone, leave me alone!”

  He had a stroke and tumbled down the narrow flight of stairs in the house. Crying softly, he lay at the bottom, not quite sure what had happened to him, calling aloud for help when he found he could not use his hands. There was no help; no one heard his cries. He lay on the floor until he had enough strength to climb into bed, and he lay there for a horrible week during which he somehow managed to keep alive.

  Then he was afraid to be alone, and he got Madame Bonneville to come and keep house for him. She was little enough use; three children that ran like rabbits kept her in perpetual fear that they would be lost in the woods and kidnaped by Indians. Paine could not explain to her that there had been no Indians near New Rochelle for a hundred years. She was convinced; she alternated her fear with mournful longings for Paris, and to the sick old man she was more of a nuisance than a help.

  “Go back to New York,” he finally told her. “I will take care of the bills.”

  She had talked him into leaving a legacy for her and the children, and now she reminded him of it.

  “It will be done, it will be done,” he said.

  But he couldn’t be alone. He wasn’t afraid to die, but he feared the terrible, paralyzing effect of a stroke, and the doctor had assured him that it would come back sooner or later. So he found a hired man, named Derrick, who would work for him.

  Derrick was jealously religious; religion was all his, his personal, dread possession. With the angels behind him, he came to work for the devil, his long, horse-like face wary and determined. He could do nothing well, not plow a furrow, not cut a tree, not split a rail, but that didn’t matter for his chief occupation here was watching Tom Paine, stealing manuscripts he imagined were written in consort with the devil, burning them, carrying tales, making remarks about his employer. He also stole his employer’s whisky and was frequently drunk.