One spring morning, Tom was painting Sam Hilyard and his Indian mate on the deck of the
Dragon
. He had decided not to paint the box under Sam’s arm and was debating whether to show Africans being dumped over the side, when Elwood P. Hilyard appeared at the door.
That day, the cousins walked the shore barefoot, with their trousers rolled to their knees. The daffodils in the window boxes had shot up several inches since sunrise. The Billingsgate shore had fallen back five feet since fall.
Whatever currents had created the island from the sand were now taking it away. Year by year, it grew smaller. Season by season, more houses were taken off. This was not unusual on Cape Cod. It was simply part of the bargain Cape Codders made with the place they lived. They pulled houses back from bluffs and floated them off eroding islands as readily as peddlers moved carts on Boston street corners.
The cousins came to a set of greased ways running from a little cottage to the water, as though the cottage were a boat about to be launched. “When labor’s cheap and wood’s expensive,” said Tom, “moving houses makes good sense.”
“You’ll have to move soon. I could guarantee you a room in your own hotel, if you cared to help.”
“I’m an old hermit.” Tom picked up a wad of grease on his finger. A year earlier, he would have stolen it to make paint. His fortunes had turned quickly, but he cared little for fortune itself. “They say you’re marrying a Brewster widow. How old?”
“Forty-six, like me.”
“Too old to bear children, then.”
“Some men proctorate children. I’d build something, if I had help.”
After giving up any dreams of love, Tom had dreamed only of inspiration and a public to appreciate his art. His dream had come true. How could he resist the cry of another dreamer? He agreed to cosign loans and paint a picture to flatter an investor.
The investor was Lorenzo Dow Baker, a square-hulled old Wellfleet Methodist who first imported bananas to America, founded United Fruit, and built the Chequesset Inn, the grand wave of gray wood and gables rising on Wellfleet Harbor.
At Baker’s office, Elwood put in his monocle and presented a proposal—a hotel on Jack’s Island to handle the guests that the Chequesset could not accommodate. Tom presented a painting called
First House
, of Stephen Hopkins finishing the thatch on his roof. And even Baker could fall to flattery when Tom Hilyard compared him to his Pilgrim ancestors.
He agreed to give them a loan, but first he would have his attorneys ask “a few friendly questions” about the Hilyards. His local attorneys were Bigelow, Holden, and Hoar, and his friendly questions received decidedly unfriendly answers. The convergence of the Hilyards and the Bigelows at the worst possible moment now seemed to have become a Cape Cod tradition.
A few days later, Tom arrived at Jack’s Island with hotel sketches in hand. The sun was bright, but Elwood was in his cottage, the shades drawn, a half-empty gin bottle on the table in front of him. He wore only his union suit and a pair of fishy trousers. As for his Vandyke, it was disappearing into the fringe of beard like a lawn giving up to the weeds. “Damnable Bigelows” was all he said.
Tom learned the story from Zachary.
“What will you do?” Tom asked.
“What I always done. Got mouths to feed.” Zachary picked his teeth with a match.
“Don’t this make you mad? The Bigelows doin’ it to us again?” Tom asked.
“But what do we have to fight with?”
Tom slipped the match from Zachary’s teeth. “The book of history will set us free from the evil that bricks us up.”
The lamps burned bright on Billingsgate that night and for many nights after. Tom Hilyard had an ancient story to use in an ancient… fight and a gathering of ancients in which to use it.
Before dawn on May 26, 1897, he put on his best suit, rolled a sketch into a tube, and tied it with string. As the first streaks of red came into the sky, he sailed his sharpie across to Wellfleet. He hurried to the depot, moving briskly in the morning chill, and caught the 4:15 local, which carried iced fish and mail from Provincetown, stopped in Eastham to take on milk, then rattled on through every town until Boston.
Once he was settled, he opened the newspaper: “Mayflower Log Returned.” That was the name that the Consistory Court of London had given to William Bradford’s journal.
At ten o’clock today, a Joint Convention of the Great and General Court will be held at the State House to receive Captain William Bradford’s
Mayflower
Log from Thomas F. Bayard, former Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, who has personally conveyed the book from England.
His Honor Governor Roger Wolcott will preside. In attendance will be the Honorable George F. Hoar, senator from Massachusetts, along with members of the American Antiquarian Society, the Pilgrim Society, and the New England Society of New York.
“A marvelous day for all Americans,” enthused State Senator Charles Bigelow, Republican of Barnstable. “There may be nothing like this book in human annals since the story of Bethlehem. It tells of the birth of America, and it belongs in Massachusetts, America’s birthplace.” Senator Bigelow, descendant of Pilgrim Ezra Bigelow, will address the assembly.
Tom Hilyard reached the State House around seven. The corridors were deserted. His limping footsteps echoed and scraped ahead of him until met in the distance by janitors’ voices and the scraping of mop buckets across marble.
At Bigelow’s office, he tried the door. It swung open, revealing
Reading the Compact
, which was hanging between the windows. The draperies were a rich blue and gold, the spittoons shining brass.
“Mrs. Pierce? You’re early, Mrs. Pierce,” came a familiar voice from the inner office.
Tom had not expected it to go so easily. He was tempted to put the tube on the desk and leave. But he had learned in lifesaving how to summon his courage when it would not come forth on its own. And he had come here to save a life—Elwood’s. He stepped into the inner office.
Bigelow’s chair was turned toward the window. A morning coat hung on the rack, and a pair of gray striped trousers stretched from Bigelow’s chair to the windowsill, where two polished boots crossed at the ankles. “Mrs. Pierce?”
“Not Mrs. Pierce. Tom Hilyard.”
Bigelow spun in his chair, and several sheets of paper fluttered from his lap. He had grown heavier. His face was full, his belly fuller, and he now had a most opulent gray mustache. A tracery of red veins showed on his cheeks and nose. Nothing extreme, of course, just a delicate little coloration that looked healthy, though it was not.
“Tom Hilyard?” Bigelow spread a smile over his shock. “Why, I didn’t know you were invited.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You should have been, considering what your art has done for the Pilgrim tale.”
“I’m planning to do more.” Tom kicked the door shut.
The color drained from Bigelow’s face. This pleased Tom, who knew his own face was as gray as his trousers.
“Well, I can’t think of anything I’d rather see than more of your paintings.” Bigelow got up slowly and went toward the door. “Have you seen the place of honor that I’ve given to
Reading the Compact?
”
Tom did not try to stop him. In his younger days, it would not have bothered him that Bigelow was nearly twice his size, but he had not come with a physical threat.
Bigelow practically jumped into the outer office. “Yes, Tom, come out and see it. Mrs. Pierce?” Bigelow stuck his head out the door and called up and down the marble corridor. “Mrs. Pierce? Pierce… ierce… ce!”
“Nobody here yet,” said Tom, “except for one of today’s honored guests… and someone come to honor him.”
Bigelow pulled his head back into the office. “Honor?”
“With a new painting.” Tom handed the tube to Bigelow. “This is just the study.”
Charles looked at the tube as though it might explode, took it, then tore it open. “What is this?”
“The master of the
Mayflower
in his cabin, looking out at the wife of the man who brings us together today.”
“Captain Bradford, you mean?”
“That’s what the newspapers call him. But he was no captain, and his book’s no log. I know that for a fact.”
“What are you saying?”
Tom pointed to the sketch like a patient instructor. “That’s Dorothy Bradford, who drowned the night of December 10, 1620. Her husband’s book doesn’t mention it. Was it an accident? A suicide? I think someone killed her. I’ve painted him in.”
Bigelow’s eyes searched the rough-penciled shadows and turned again to Tom Hilyard.
“Master Jones seemed to think it was a killing—”
“You haven’t come here to honor me or my family.”
“I honor your hypocrisy.” Tom felt a touch of pride at phrasing himself so well before such a well-spoken man.
“Get out and take this with you.” Bigelow tried to shove the sketch back into Tom’s hands.
Tom imagined an angry wave building before his surfboat. “The ancestor on whose name your father built First Comers Cooperative, the one you praise in all your speeches, is the man in the shadows of my painting, and he’s about to
push
Dorothy Bradford.”
“What?” Bigelow closed the outer door. “Where did you hear this?”
Tom jerked his thumb at the painting behind him. “Same place I learned about the reading of the Compact.”
“Where?” demanded Bigelow.
“Where
, damn you?”
The wave rolled toward him, threatened to overturn him, but Tom kept calmly to his oars. “I read it in a book as genuine as the one we’re making such a fuss over today.”
“This is
invention.”
Bigelow straightened his waistcoat. “You’ve invented this to… to blackmail a member of the Great and General Court of Massachusetts. Well, I won’t stand for it.”
Blackmail
. Tom had not considered it such, but blackmail was what he was about, and like a raging surf, once embarked upon, it was as dangerous to back away from as to face. “What will the members of the Great and General Court think, or the voters who put you there, if they learn that a man who’s bragged on the purity of his ancestry, who claims descent from the first white Americans, descends from the first white murderer?”
“Why… this is absurd.”
Tom threw the sketch on the desk. “The painting is finished. Dark, shadowy, splashes of yellow lanternlight… and the template names all the players. I even gave the first murderer in America
your
face.”
Charles Bigelow began to sputter. He was, quite simply, speechless.
If Tom had so demanded, Bigelow would have given up his opposition to the hotel right then, but Tom had no experience in these negotiating games, and so he started to leave. “There are a lot of people in this country who cry ‘America for Americans.’ You’ve gotten votes doing it, and you’ll do it again when you run for Washington. Maybe I’ll save the painting until then.”
“The nativist plank is as honorable as any in the platform of the Republican party.”
“My mother was a Republican. She believed that all men were created equal.” Tom limped into the hall and headed for the stairway. “We all came as outsiders from somewhere else.”
Bigelow went after him. Their footsteps echoed and scraped along the marble. “I refuse to let a hotel be built on Jack’s Island. Do you understand that?”
Tom listened only to the echoes coming back and bouncing away again, until he put his hand on the brass rail of the stairway and took the first step. Then he stopped, as he had planned. “There is a way to keep this story private.”
“You have no story. You’ve made this up.”
“See what people say when the painting is exhibited.” Tom decided to go and leave Bigelow standing there, his great day spoiled before it began.
“Wait!” Bigelow grabbed Tom’s elbow, but Tom pushed him away.
The staircase had been built with extra-deep treads and shallow risers to create a magisterial slope… and very unfamiliar footing.
Tom led with his bad foot and missed the step. His ankle turned. The poorly knit bones snapped. He grappled with Bigelow for a handhold, but it seemed as if Bigelow was helping him to fall.
He cried out as he tumbled. He heard the echo of his own cry. Then he heard a thump, like a melon striking a sidewalk—the back of his head hitting the nosing of a step. Then… nothing, for months….
… Golden shafts of afternoon light came through the windows of the Billingsgate house. They settled, as always, upon the side of the brick chimney. It was summer 1898.
Tom studied the shaft of light, for he loved the light. It was hard and simple and told the truth.
But now the light began to move. Not slowly, as light should move on a summer afternoon, but like a lighthouse beam passing through one window and then the next. His own shadow fled across the wall, reached the corner, bent strangely, and disappeared.
He raised his hands to his temples to try to stop the spinning in his head. He looked out the window to take his eyes off things that seemed to be spinning with him. He saw, as always, the familiar sand of Billingsgate, the fringe of dune grass, the blue sky. But then the window moved away from the sand and he saw… water?
Water
. Wellfleet Harbor, swinging into view.
His ears were pierced by a shattering whistle. The window swung farther, and he saw the little steam lighter. Its cable snapped taut. His house began to move.
Now a face came toward him. It was Elwood who had brought him here, to sit in his favorite room for a final time. Elwood was saying something about floating the house off the island before the sea took it. Tom watched the light, still moving….
At Campground Landing in Eastham, a farmer with an ox team slipped the raft onto rollers and dragged the house away. The Hilyards had no use for it. Zachary and his family lived in the solid house Sam Hilyard had built; Elwood and his wife had taken Tom to live with them in the family quarters of the new Hilyard House Hotel.
Only Tom cared, but he could tell no one. He had spent six months in a coma. And he had not spoken since, nor did he seem to understand what had happened. But when Elwood put him in front of a canvas and slipped a paintbrush into his hand, the first thing he painted was the house. And it was all that he had painted since—from the inside, from the out side, in daylight, by starlight, under clouds, in the sun.
House on Billingsgate
, Number 1, Number 10, Number 15…