Arundel (21 page)

Indeed, it often seemed to me, as the seasons rolled on, that the independent-mindedness of many of our people would have better borne another name—opposite-mindedness, belike, or cussed-mindedness.

We had hard times when the French wars were over. There were two years of drought and no more selling of supplies to the English, so the farmers could not get shut of their com. They were in debt to the merchants for stock and supplies, and too often in debt for their land as well, though they could usually find enough for a glass of rum. Rich men in Portsmouth and Boston and Connecticut were investing in land speculations in the distant West, along the Susquehannah and farther. It was possible for settlers to get Western farm lands for fifty cents an acre, since the speculators obtained it for a cent an acre, or less, by stealing it from the Indians. Therefore there was no demand for land near old settlements, such as our own; and the value of our farms sank so low they could scarce be given away.

When some of our farmers came to the inn of a winter’s evening and filled themselves with French rum, you would have thought from the way they pounded the tables and cursed that they were going to march to Portsmouth or Boston the next day and carve their initials on the livers of the land speculators who were causing them such grief, and making it difficult for them to get their hands on ready money, and thus robbing them of their liberty.

Those who worked in the shipyards, and some of the fishermen, too, got wind of a way to make money, just by printing it and giving it to people who would pledge land as security against the money they received, or some such foolish scheme. They went yelling and squalling around in a teeter of excitement, always in a rage because the sensible merchants who had the right of voting, which these crazy-headed people didn’t have, refused to let them print money. They were angry against the merchants, and angry because they had no votes with which to beat the merchants and get paper currency. One who heard them ranting about liberty in the tavern of nights would have thought that liberty was somebody like a female relative, and that she had been assaulted around the corner somewhere a few minutes before and had her scalp taken.

For the matter of that, they seemed to have some reason on their side. I could see no good cause why the town meetings of our New England towns should be controlled by a lot of overwealthy robbers who had made themselves rich while less careful and less godly men had fought in the wars, and the mass of people in the towns, including those who did the fighting, have no voice in elections.

When the paper-money roarers and anti-capitalist bellowers had finished pounding on tables, the English-haters would begin pounding; and it was hard to tell which of them could pound hardest. On some nights, when I had been busy serving out rum and copying accounts from the board on the wall until my brain was all thick and curdled, it seemed to me I must get down my hatchet from the slot over the front door, where I kept it in case Guerlac should come back again, and sink it into the head of the next man who bawled “Sugar Act” and banged the table with his fist.

For years everybody in Arundel and the other New England seacoast settlements had traded wherever he pleased and with whomever he pleased, and thought no more about it. Our New England rum was made out of molasses smuggled into Portsmouth and Boston from the French Sugar Islands, there being insufficient molasses in the English Sugar Islands to supply our rummeries; and the French molasses being cheaper to boot. Also our sugar for hot rum punches and other purposes came from the French Sugar Islands, as did our French rum, all of it being smuggled, since only a madman would pay duty on what everyone was smuggling; and since any customs officer, for the gift of a pair of shoe buckles or a new hat, would close his eyes to anything. Everybody south of Halifax who owned a vessel larger than a hash-chopper had busied himself at smuggling at one time or another, even though not pretending to such operations as Peter Faneuil or John Hancock of Boston, and the other merchants with plenty of money made from the wars.

Then, of a sudden, after the Sugar Act against smuggling had been ignored by everyone for more than a generation, the lunk-headed English decided that the ancient, bewhiskered, forgotten law must be enforced. The merchants in Boston, not wishing to be disturbed in their smuggling, hired a man to travel around and explain the evils of the law. He stopped at our inn one night and out-bawled and outpounded all those in the gathering-room, buying rum for them and telling how a duty on molasses and sugar would ruin both the distilleries and the fisheries, which were our greatest industries.

He did more than curse England and her mouse-headed lawmakers. He told the open-mouthed crew of drinkers in our gathering-room how, if the Sugar Act should be enforced, five thousand New England seamen would be turned out of employment and would starve; and how other workmen who depended on the seamen would also suffer—coopers and farmers and tanners and shoemakers and sailmakers and innkeepers and God knows who-all. From that night onward, then, the wild folk who bawled for paper money, forgetful of their rage against the merchants, began to join with them in bawling that England was crushing their liberty; and our inn was in an uproar every night.

Always, since my father’s death, I had sought eagerly for news of Mary and Guerlac, thinking to go to Quebec as soon as I felt myself sufficiently strong to clout Guerlac on the head when I found him, and carry Mary away with me to wear figured brocades and rule over my kingdom at the mouth of the Arundel River—though I knew I would have to banish the bawlers and table-pounders before I could provide the proper kingdom for her.

For a time, though I spoke with every passing trapper who had set foot in Quebec, I could get no word whatever of Mary, nor of Guerlac either. Natanis came to see me, bringing sable skins which I sold to the governor of Massachusetts, Bernard, who sent his scented secretary to get them. Natanis brought me news of Manatqua; how his pride at the two wigs he had received from my father had been so great that he dared not leave either of them in his cabin lest it be stolen or lost. He would wear one and hold the other in his hands, and do no hunting at all, hardly, so that the Abenakis had deposed him as sachem, a pitiful case. Natanis gave me reports, too, of Hobomok and Jacataqua; how Hobomok had learned to out-scream every
m’téoulin
in the valley of the Kennebec, and how Jacataqua was becoming beautiful, slender and straight like her mother. Learning that I had heard nothing of Mary, he offered to travel to Quebec; and that summer he did so, but could discover nothing save that Guerlac was in France.

Even had I learned anything, I doubt that I could have availed myself of it. My mother and sisters were half distracted because of the noisy and discontented gatherings that cluttered our inn; and it was my task to keep order, since a woman could not make herself heard, while hired men like Jethro Fish, instead of keeping order, would join in the arguments and become as tumultuous and contentious as any of the others.

I doubt, even, that these discontented folk, when full of rum, would have consented to be kept in order by any but myself; but me they regarded as a boy; and since I had some strength from working at the forge and practising Arnold’s tricks, I could haul them from the house when their feet became unmanageable, slap their faces to bring back their senses, and dowse them in the creek, all with an apologetic air, and all without arousing their displeasure.

Also my mother, still having her looks because my father had not made a pack horse and a brood mare out of her, as is the custom in our section of New England, and being the owner of a tidy property, was constantly snuggled up to by widowers and bachelors who hoped to be supported handsomely for the remainder of their days. Being a woman of gentleness, and having an eye, furthermore, to our earnings, she forbore to send these snugglers about their affairs, and so had little time to watch over the inn’s business.

To me, however, she spoke her mind about those who pursued her, saying that my father had been the only man in all New England, she believed, who would not hurry out to get a new wife within five minutes after his previous wife died; and that there was no distinction in men’s minds between a shirt and a wife; almost anything would do; and they were to be worn out, both of them, and replaced at once if lost; and few cared whether or not they were ever washed so long as they were serviceable.

When, therefore, Phoebe Marvin came to the inn one morning and asked to be allowed to work for us for a dollar a week, with some instruction in letters thrown in, I could not make the protest I would otherwise have made.

She was less unendurable than she had once been, but I still found her capable, at times, of trying the patience of Job. She was thin, but with a compactness about her thinness that came, I think, from the hours she spent in the water during the warm weather, when there was scandalous talk about her because her swimming garment was an ancient gingham dress, cut off above the knee and sewn at the bottom so that it ended in pantalettes instead of a skirt. Scandalmongers had trouble seeing her because of her persistence in remaining under water when onlookers were about, swimming on her back so that nothing showed but her nose and chin, and emitting derisive jets of water from time to time between pursed lips; but those who had seen her complained that she went about in the sun with the top of her dress unbuttoned.

All the day she was in the water or on it, fishing from a crazy skiff she had dug from the mud and patched with pitch and rotten canvas, and calked with rags and old rope. In this fearful craft she sailed in and out of the river and around the reefs until every seaman in the place threw up his hands and swore that by rights she should have been drowned ten times each month. Because of this, doubtless, she was a golden color on those portions of her that could be seen, as well, I suspected, as on several portions that could not be seen: a most unmaidenly color, wholly unlike the beautiful whiteness of Mary.

She had recovered from her hellish manner of bursting into eldritch screams or hoydenish titterings at her own rude remarks; and she had even learned to be silent in the presence of her elders and betters. Yet there came often into her eyes, which were gray and could seem as hard as the ledges that crop out in our pine forests, a look in which was concentrated all the rudeness and jeers she had been wont to express aloud.

One evening I came on her looking out of a window into the red clouds in the west and weeping silently. Being, as I have shown, of a forgiving nature, I put my hand on her shoulder and asked her why she cried. Since she did not move, and since the twilight bent me to gentleness, I reached around her and turned her against my breast, repeating my question. She was as taut in my hands, when I turned her, as a bowstring, and as unyielding as a quiverful of arrows; and her eyes examined me as though from a distance, with a scoffing look in them that made me take my hands from her and cry, “Don’t you say that!” Not with a torrent of words and eldritch screams of laughter could she have sneered at Mary more effectively.

She wished to work for us, she said, because she must have schooling which she could not get elsewhere; but I think it was because she knew my father had liked her father, and was sure I would give her rum for him—rum he needed for dulling the pain in his arrow-pierced shoulder, but could no longer buy. Otherwise I doubt she would have worked for anyone; for our girls are so independent that some of them will starve rather than take orders from strangers. In a way I counted myself fortunate to have her help, though she irked me so sorely, with her jeering glance, that I often longed to hit her with my mother’s wooden pestle.

We put her to helping in the gathering-room of nights; and her squirrel-like quickness stood her in good stead when the men tried to maul her. She knew more tricks to escape from a man than any wench I ever saw. If it had not been so my mother would have refused to let her stay there, just as she refused to let my sisters go into the gathering-room when the men had commenced on their rum.