Читать книгу Captain Abby and Captain John: An Around-the-world Biography - Robert P. Tristram Coffin - Страница 6

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It was early April. The clear sun was rolling big as a cartwheel through the golden green new leaves on the birches. It was a day full of a thousand bright new frogs. They were so new and bold and full of Spring that they were going it full cry at nine o’clock in the morning down in Cap’n Ben’s swamp. They were daring all the boys in Christendom to come and chase them. They were sassing every boy within a mile.

But Johnnie Pennell wasn’t headed their way. He was headed south-by-west, and he was going fast away from the frogs. His feet were sending up quick puffs of dust on the road. He was headed bee-line for the yellow schoolhouse. He was going so fast his tight long trousers were threatening to slice him up from the bottom and make two Johnnie Pennells of him. His trousers were tight across his stern. And his stern had three horizontal lines where the dust of Middle Bays he had been sitting on as he contemplated frogs was neatly flicked off and three lines of clean blue cloth showed.

Two steps and a half behind the boy puffed Deborah Pennell. She had a long birch switch in her hand. She had hard work to keep within business distance of the boy ahead. Every so often she got up to what she thought was the proper distance. She lashed out with the switch. But Johnnie seemed to have eyes in his back. For he hitched his stern ahead with remarkable nimbleness in the middle of his stride. There was only the whistle of birch on empty air. The woman lost a step or two and most of her balance as her right arm swept its empty arc. But she recovered her balance, made up for lost time with three quick steps, and began to measure once more with an artist’s practiced eye the distance to her plump double target again. Her eye lighted up like the eye of an eagle.

Mrs. Deborah Pennell was seeing her eighth and youngest son to school.

Deborah had seen seven sons to school, and they were all doing men’s business now in the family’s shipyard or on the family’s ocean. The Pennells looked upon the Atlantic as theirs. They had begun to cover it with ships as fast as they could, under the encouragement of their mother Deborah. They didn’t hear the whistle of birch now, the older Pennell brothers, but they heard their mother’s tongue. Deborah never shirked her duty. She was not the mother to shirk on her latest baby. If oil of birch could do it, the baby would take his place and tend to business beside his brothers. John Pennell would be a sea captain yet, by the Great Horn Spoon, as long as the Middle Bays birchwoods held out! There would be no playing with frogs on an April schoolday morning. She had smarted up seven backsides in her time and sent the young men at the front of them on into life and glory. She wasn’t going to stay her hand on the last witness of her husband’s manhood presented to her before her husband died. She was the head and manager of the Pennells now. She was going to make the Pennell Brothers’ new blue-and-white flag known from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from Batavia to Buenos Aires, or her nose didn’t have a mole on it halfway down.

Deborah took an extra long step. She drew her arm back and took another fierce switch at her hurrying son. This time she got home. Johnnie yipped loud and left the ground with a smart leap. Another blue mark joined the three already stamped across the Capes of Good Hope before her. Her son’s school trousers were made of Cap’n Jacob’s own best blue Sunday ones. It had cost her a pang to cut them down for her youngest. But time moved on, and new men must come up to handle the times. Johnnie stood in his father’s trousers. She’d dust the dust out of them!

The thirteen-year-old boy reached the wide stone doorstep and leaped into the open door like a frog into a deep pool and safety. Deborah halted at the stone and waited grimly. The sound of excited childish voices came out to her through the door. Then there was the deep bass of the teacher’s stern voice. Deborah still waited. There was a dramatic silence. Then the sounds began, with perfect regularity. The sound of leather lighting on what schoolhouse leather loved best. Deborah counted the cracks. Ten of them. Then she tucked her birch sapling under her right arm, for the tomorrows. She put up the sunshade she had thought to bring along under her left arm, and she walked slowly back up the Pennells’ Wharf Road towards the little cottage on the hill, second of the Pennell houses, where all the Pennells had begun in the wiry loins of her husband’s sire, Thomas.

Benjamin, Jacob, Jr., James, Job, Charles, Joseph, and Robert—the three daughters did not count until they got sea captain husbands to make up for their mistake in sex. Deborah had seen the seven sons to school on bright April mornings when frogs were calling and robins were playing truant in the trees. She had seen them all to school. She had tingled them all into great ambition to do their sums and get ahead to adzes and hammers and tree-nails and wives and babies. And now John, the last. The last of her sons to see to school. She was kind of sad about his being the last. But boys grew up. Maybe she could begin on the grandchildren soon. She had an eye on three who were almost at school age. Maybe there would be no break in her April mornings. She put up her birch switch carefully over the door on the gun-rack. It might do for many years yet. It was well seasoned. Her sadness lifted from her.

The last pair of boy trousers were safely throbbing under a boy with his head full of fractions instead of frogs, full of Dakota Territory and Nebraska and Kansas Territories and Van Dieman’s Land.

John Pennell would make the finest shipbuilder or sea captain of them all. He was built in his backsides the leanest and likest his father.