To be sure, the Fugitive Slave Law had seldom been exercised in Massachusetts after Boston abolitionists rescued a slave named Shadrach from federal custody. In the decade that the law was in force, only seven slaves would be re manded, six from Boston and one from Hyannis. Yet any man or woman who worked on the Underground Railroad risked freedom and fortune with every slave.
Isaac did dangerous things with a smile and principled things without a hint of self-importance. If he had a passion, beyond Nancy and an occasional drink, it was for fine-lined vessels. He built one, a fast mackerel schooner. And from Captain Rains’s house above the Shiverick shipyard, he watched many more take shape.
Clippers, they were called, and they came down the ways with steeply raked bows and hulls like the flanks of fine racehorses—
Hippogriffe, Belle of the West, Wild Hunter—
ships to break hearts and break records, whether hauling around the Horn in a hundred days or speeding tea from China in a few days more.
And every one was mastered and mated by men of East Dennis. When Captain Joshua Sears took command of the
Wild Hunter
, he offered Isaac a position as third mate. The railroad, said Isaac, would have to run without him.
Nancy, her two older sons, and little Thomas journeyed to Boston to bid him farewell. The older boys, nearing their twenties, went reluctantly, as they had nothing but resentment for the man who had replaced their father. Little Tom went even more unwillingly, because he feared that a year’s voyage would mean forever.
The
Wild Hunter
had left the Shiverick shipyard without masts, a fledgling towed north by a steam tug. In Boston, riggers transformed her into an eagle. As each sail puffed open, she seemed to gather the light around her, to rise higher on the water, to dwarf all the schooners and squat smoking steamboats plying the harbor. When she entered Nantasket Roads and made for the open sea, she seemed truly to be flying. And that was how Nancy always remembered her husband.
Dearest Nancy,
As wife of a ship’s officer and widow of a shipmaster, you know that letters from men other than your husband do not bring good news. So it is with this missive, which I compose as
Wild Hunter
sails in ballast for Calcutta.
Isaac is dead. No more painful words can be written or read. I know you will weep, as you have wept before, but know that it is the way of the sea. And after your bereavement, you will wish to know the circumstances of his death, so herewith I offer them.
We were cruising off the Formosa Strait, where Chinese pirates are known to prowl in lateen-rigged boats called proas. They arm themselves mostly with lances, axes, and dastardly things called stinkpots. These contain a foul herb, which they light and hurl onto the deck, so that the crew inhale the smoke and fall to retching and blindness.
As we passed Quemoy, out they came, scores of proas, each manned by forty or fifty screaming chink devils. They had been waiting for some unsuspecting Yank, but they did not reckon on the speed of
Wild Hunter
or the courage of men like your husband.
I bore straight into them at fifteen knots while Isaac meanwhile meted out the muskets, which soon were meting out lead. Then he took command of our two four-pounders and directed the fire with such accuracy that they dismasted five proas and created thriving confusion amongst the cutthroat fleet. But they kept coming—Lord there are so many heathen chinks—and enough drew close that soon the stinkpots came over.
I’ll blame the foul-smelling herb for the fact that several of our seamen fell to their knees and began to pray like women at a Methodist camp meeting. Prayer is fine in its place. But the Lord wants action in hard straits, and Isaac got those prayerful cowards to tossing the stinkpots right back at the chinks.
But it was our bad luck that some of the chinks had themselves guns, big blunderbusses that spread bird shot like sand grains in a windstorm. It was our worse luck that three of our men were struck, among them your Isaac.
He lingered three days. On the last he was calm and even made a joke or two. He said that if he met Sam Hilyard when he got to where he was goin’, he’d see that the old b told him exactly where the book was hidden, then he’d find a way to tell you. Knowing nothing about this, I simply nodded and said some soothing words, but his last remarks may have meaning for you.
He died with your name and little Tom’s on his lips.
Thy ways, O Lord, are past finding out.
Captain Joshua Sears
Nancy now carried this letter as a bookmark, so that whenever she read the Pilgrim story, she would think of the husband who inherited his courage from the First Comers.
She and little Tom walked north several miles. The sand cliffs rose like a wall on the left, the gray Atlantic rolled eternally to the right, and the deserted majesty of the beach beckoned her through the fog, as if through time. In one sweep of the eye, she saw near past and close future, and yet the generations before her and the generations to come were lost in sea mist and fog.
Isaac and Hannah and Sam had now faded behind her. The sons she had made with John Rains raced ahead. Only little Tom remained at her side, his breeches rolled up to his knees, his childish laughter flung against the roar of the surf. He chased the waves when they receded and ran frantically up the beach when they rolled in again, and she tried to fix this moment in her memory, for she knew that all too soon he would be lost in the mists as well.
At last they came to a hollow in the bluff, where a small hut materialized. Above the door was a sign.
“What do it say?” asked Tom.
“ ‘For Cases of Distress Only.’ ”
“What’s distress?”
“Trouble. Your father and I were in trouble the night we found this hut. We kept each other warm till mornin’. That’s what these houses are for. They shelter shipwrecked sailors who make it out of the surf.”
“Are we in trouble now?”
She tousled his hair. “More sadness than trouble.”
It was chillier in the little hut than outside, and there was about it the leaf-mold smell of an old animal nest. The gray light coming through the door revealed a fireplace, firewood, benches, a tin case with matches and candles, and filling most of the room, a lifeboat for the brave soul who, once saved from the storm, might brave it again to save his mates…. Just as she remembered it.
They built a fire and ate their lunch. Then she told him of their first trip to help the slaves, emphasizing the bravery of his father, not the sad ending. Afterward, as the surf breathed like a sated beast upon the beach, little Tom slept.
Nancy took out her book. She picked up at the place where she had been reading of the First Encounter: “Thus it pleased God to vanquish their enemies and give them deliverance, and by his special providence so to dispose that not any one of them were hurt or hit….”
There was a knock and Nancy looked up with a start. A man stood in the doorway, a traveler, dressed in rough clothes, with a pack on his back, a walking staff in his hand, and tallow-covered shoes on his feet. He had a prominent nose and dark eyes that might have seemed threatening but for his benign smile and familiar presence. “I saw smoke from the chimney and thought there might have been a shipwreck. Would you need help?”
Nancy shook her head and instinctively put herself between the man and her son.
“May I come in?”
She closed her book and set it aside. “If you are in distress, the Massachusetts Humane Society welcomes you.”
“It’s cold for June.
That’s
distressing.”
“Cape Cod can be cold in any month.”
“But a warm hearth… the heart of charity. It’ll warm for a time, but inevitably grows cold.” He dropped his pack and rubbed his hands together over the flames. “What would a woman and her son be doing here on such a gloomy day?”
“I revisit a place with happy memories.”
He looked around. “We are fortunate not to meet in one of your sadder places.”
“And you?”
“A deserted beach is more beautiful to me than the finest houses in Cambridgeport or Brewster.”
From his talk she knew him now. “You travel alone this time. You have simplified your existence even further.” And she described their first meeting in a coach.
“I have scribbled a bit on that journey,” said Henry David Thoreau. “You may have seen it in
Putnam’s.
”
“Beyond the
Liberator
and the Yarmouth
Register
, my reading is limited.”
“The
Liberator?
You hold with the abolitionists?”
“ ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident…’ A simple vision that the abolitionists put to practice. You once told a new widow to simplify, and she became an abolitionist.”
“Even simple things become complicated in the modern world.” He noticed the book she had set on the bench. “What do you read today?”
“The newspapers call it the log of the
Mayflower.”
Thoreau opened the book.
“ ‘Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647
, by William Bradford.” And with a reverence that the well-made volume inspired in the well-made man, he turned the leaves and here and there read a phrase to himself. “This publication has caused quite a sensation.”
Bradford’s manuscript had disappeared from the New England Library when the British left Boston in 1776. Some blamed British soldiers for the theft; others blamed Thomas Hutchinson, the last civilian royal governor. Then, in 1855, the original appeared in the library of the Bishop of London, and while controversy over its ownership simmered, the published version was recognized as one of the seminal volumes in American history.
Nancy had decided that this must be the book her grandfather had spoken of. She knew it was not an actual log, as the newspapers had proclaimed. But could there be a companion, with a history as unusual? She thought not. Somewhere in time, the Bradford journal had become part of a family myth that now must fade.
“ ‘So they left that goodly and pleasant city which had been their resting place near twelve years.’ ” Thoreau looked up. “There is no such thing as a goodly and pleasant city.” Then he continued to read. “ ‘But they knew they were pilgrims, and… lifted up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits.’ ”
“Mr. Bradford was a fine writer.”
“Indeed he was,” said Thoreau, handing her back the book. “But the sentiment is not to my taste.”
“They were brave people, sir.”
“They thought they brought God to the wilderness when all the while, God was here waiting for them if only they cared to look.” Thoreau went to the door and gazed out at the ocean. “Be thankful your Cape is as yet unknown to the fashionable world. You still have the chance to find something greater here. But the time must come when this coast will be a place of resort.”
Nancy laughed. “That I cannot believe.”
“Mother?” Little Tom rolled out of his sleep. “I was dreaming of a bird, a bobolink.”
Thoreau cocked his head. “I believe I hear a bird, and a bobolink it is, back up in the hollow.”
The boy sat up and rubbed his eyes. “What makes he sing so sweet, Mother? Do he eat flowers?”
Thoreau laughed. “A fine observation.”
The fog thinned for a moment, and the sun knifed down, turning the beach to gold, the sea to delft blue.
“I must be off.” Thoreau shouldered his pack. “Remember, Mrs. Hilyard: drink deep of this place before it’s gone. You may stand on this beach and put slavery and compromise, cotton gins and railroads, peddlers and politicians, indeed, you may stand here and put all of America behind you.”
They watched Thoreau through the doorway for a time. Then little Tom looked over his shoulder. “All I sees behind me is a wall.”
July 16
The Philosopher and the Beach
was one of Tom Hilyard’s earliest works.
It hung in Agnes’s upstairs sitting room, between the windows. Janice liked the flatness of it, the child’s eyes through which were seen sky, sea, and golden sand in three horizontal bands, a man in blue and brown sauntering along, content with the world and whatever deep thoughts were in his head. And there was a bird flying behind him. It looked like a bobolink.
“I found that painting in a barn in 1949. I bought it for fifty dollars. Worth a bit more today.” Agnes poured coffee and offered Janice a doughnut. “It’s supposed to be Thoreau.”
“Without a care.” Which was not how Janice felt. She unfolded the last of Hannah’s letters. She had read them all now, absorbed them, seen the world through Hannah’s eyes, lectured her husband with Hannah’s words. But, buried in a box that no one had opened in decades, she had found a letter that said maybe it was time for her to come back to the present. “The artist’s mother was bothered by the same thing that’s been bothering
me
lately.”
Agnes sat in her rocker, hummed a bit, as she sometimes did, and pressed the remote button to start the TV. “It’s about time you told me what’s really going on between you and Geoff.”
Janice began to read: “ ‘Dear Nancy, The news reaches me—’ ”
“It sounds as if they were worlds apart,” said Agnes, “and yet Hannah was here and Nancy was in your father’s house down in Dennis.”
“ ‘—of your husband’s tragic death at the hands of Chinese pirates. The Lord’s ways are past finding out. He was a good man, no matter what. You showed great good sense to marry him over my objections. We shall all miss his courage and laconic humor.’ ”
“Cape Cod virtues for certain.”
“ ‘But I am concerned about his last words, as told by Captain Sears, for I fear that they have been on your mind. That damn book—’ ” Janice looked at her grandmother for some reaction, but Agnes’s eyes were on the television set. “ ‘That damn book must be forgotten.’ Now, here’s the crossed-out part. ‘Whatever Sam did with the book, he left no key to its whereabouts. Let us not search for it, either in this world or in the next. It will only bring sadness.’ ”