Читать книгу Lydia Bailey - Kenneth Roberts - Страница 5

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There was no doubt whatever in my mind that if my uncle hadn’t written that opinion for the Independent Argus, Bailey himself would have written a similar one, or got somebody else to do it, and would have been arrested just as promptly. My uncle certainly wasn’t to blame for his arrest, as I saw it; but I couldn’t make my uncle see it that way. The moment he heard Bailey had been arrested for publishing the opinion, he told my aunt to pack his bag: he was going to Boston to act as Bailey’s lawyer.

“Colonel Tyng,” my aunt said—which was how she always addressed him, extremely formal, as though they weren’t too well acquainted, “Colonel Tyng, it’s folly for you to do any such thing—folly pure and simple! You know as well as I do that your kidneys couldn’t stand any such coach trip!”

The Colonel gave her a frosty look. “Emmy,” he said, “I’ll thank you to leave my kidneys out of this! As for a coach trip, you’re the only one talking about any such thing. I’ll go up to Boston in style in the captain’s cabin of Tom Oxnard’s brig, and I guess the Atlantic Ocean’s big enough to take up any slack in my kidneys!”

“Albion,” my aunt said, “don’t stand there like a bump on a log! Speak to your uncle!”

“I certainly will,” I said. “Uncle Will, you’re under no obligation whatever to rush to Bailey’s defense. I’ve heard you say a hundred times that you’d never run after your own hat when it blows off, because somebody else’ll always pick it up and bring it back.”

“Look here, Albion,” my uncle said, “I don’t like your attitude in all this! I’m doing what I think is right, and nobody worth his salt lets a mere kidney stand in the way of doing what he considers right!”

He went stamping off, and to Boston he certainly would have gone if—in lumbering down the front stairs with an armful of law books he proposed to take with him—he hadn’t missed his footing and pitched all the way to the bottom, putting his knee out of joint, spraining his ankle, and coming within an inch of apoplexy. His groans were agonizing to hear, and I was glad that I could get away from them by pelting off for the nearest doctor; but my anxiety was tempered by profound relief that his accident would definitely put an end to his determination to defend Thomas Bailey.

But I had forgotten how indomitable my uncle could be. The doctor and I got back to find he had dragged himself, with my aunt’s help, all the way upstairs and into bed; and the doctor had no sooner got an opium pill into him and snapped his knee back into place than my uncle asked when he could go to Boston.

“Boston!” the doctor cried. “Good grief, man, why make so much trouble over a little thing like suicide? If you’re determined to kill yourself, do it quietly with a pistol! Or, when I’m not looking, help yourself to some laudanum out of my bag! Boston! Good God!”

“I’m going to Boston,” my uncle said.

The doctor put down the bandage he was winding around my uncle’s ankle. “We’ll settle this right now, Judge! You won’t move out of this bed for a month! You’ll give me your word to that effect, or I’ll tie you down with ropes and put two men in this room to see you don’t come untied! I swear to God I’ll have you wrapped in a wet sheet and committed! Do I make myself clear?”

My uncle grunted and closed his eyes. The doctor glared at him; then picked up the bandage and went on with his winding. As he left, I heard him shouting to Aunt Emmy to hide my uncle’s clothes—lock his bedroom door and nail down the windows—take any steps necessary to keep him in bed.

My uncle groaned, opened his eyes, kicked at the bedclothes with his good leg; then raised himself on an elbow to look at me. “Lock up my clothes, eh?” he said. “Just try it if you want to see me knocking at the neighbors’ doors, stark naked! Albion, get me some clothes! Somebody, by God, has got to go to Boston, and that means me.”

I just laughed, but I laughed too soon; for he instantly threw back the bedclothes and laboriously swung one leg over the side of the bed. Seeing what was in his mind, I picked up his clothes, threw them into the hall, and changed the door-key from the inner to the outer side.

“You lock that door,” my uncle said, “and I’ll break the glass in the window and crawl out if I have to cut my ass to ribbons! Somebody, by the Lord Harry, has got to defend Thomas Bailey!”

That violent and determined old man never called on the Lord Harry except in moments of dire need. He meant what he said; no doubt of that.

“All right,” I said. “All right! Let’s discuss this whole business like two reasonable human beings.”

“Well,” my uncle said grimly, “don’t do too much discussing! I got to get started for Boston.” He drew the bedclothes over his legs once more, groaned, and then said, “Oh, by the way: did I tell you that Bailey was to be tried before Justice Chase of the Supreme Court?”

“Yes, you did, and he could be tried before Lord Chancellor Bloody Assizes Jeffreys for all I care! That’s no occasion for you—or for me either, because you needn’t think I don’t see what you’re driving at—to get mixed up in this case.”

“Driving at?”

“Yes, driving at! You think you’re going to talk me into going to Boston in your place, and taking on Bailey’s defense, just because I won a few cases before Judge Pettigrew. Well, I may have been a lawyer then, but I’m a farmer now, and I’m staying a farmer!”

My uncle groaned again. “Chase,” he said, “is a strange character. Frightening! Lawyers are afraid of him, and for excellent reasons.”

“What’s more,” I said, waving aside his attempt to cloud the issue, “we’ve got seven acres of land to plow, stump, lime, and harrow before the ground freezes, and it’ll never be done unless I’m here to do it.”

My uncle seemed not to hear me. “Chase was as violent a rebel, during the Revolution, as ever lived. There’s just one word to describe him, and that’s ‘tumultuous.’ He can smell a tumult a month in advance; and when it arrives, there’s Chase in the center of it.”

“To hell with Chase!” I said.

“Just be quiet a minute, Albion. I want you to visualize this skunk Chase. He made his own father take a compulsory oath of allegiance to the rebel government! He carted a batch of Philadelphia Quakers three hundred miles to a prisoners’ camp in the dead of winter because they growled a little at the rebels’ new order of things. A delegate to the first Continental Congress, he was, and always in a fight! He went to Canada with Benjamin Franklin and Charles Carroll of Carrollton to try to swing Canada to the rebel side in the Revolution—though all they did was pretty near destroy the rebel army. He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence.”

“He’s got nothing to do with me,” I insisted. “I don’t care if he signed the Ten Commandments!”

My uncle snorted. “You don’t, eh? Well, you’d care if the Chases of this world should get their way! This great rebel Chase changed his mind over night, and began to hate all revolutions. Since Jefferson sympathizes with the French Revolutionaries, Chase hates Jefferson. Since I admire Jefferson and despise everything John Adams stands for, Chase hates me too. He’ll hate everyone that stands up for Bailey or argues against the Alien and Sedition Law. He’s even left the bench to make speeches against Jefferson! A Supreme Court Judge leaving the bench, for God Almighty’s sake, to make political speeches! There’s nothing he won’t do to keep Federalists in power, and that’s why he’ll tear Bailey’s counsel to pieces! That’s why a man’s got to be a fighter to get anywhere with him.”

“Now listen,” I said. “These meadows have got to be limed this fall, and you well know that if I’m not here to do it, you’ll never be able to persuade Eddie and Owen to put on half enough lime. What’s more, low spots on this farm must be drained, or the hay’ll winter-kill.”

“Oh, be-helled and be-damned to your lime, for God’s sake,” my uncle shouted. “To hell with your low spots! To hell with your drains and your winter-kill and your bloody hay! What do you want to do, anyway? End up squeezing a cow’s teats and squawking ‘Heh! Heh! Heh! Ninety-nine years old, b’gosh, and still able to shovel manure with the boys!’ What’s cow food when a man’s freedom’s at stake!”

“Don’t ‘freedom’ me,” I said. “That damned fool Bailey wouldn’t have any freedom anywhere in the world, except to make trouble for others. Look at the way freedom’s used around here! If I go to Boston, the hired men will feel free to talk you into plowing instead of harrowing, and you’ll feel free to wreck a root-crop it’s taken me three years to build up!”

“I believe, by Heaven,” my uncle cried, “that you’re scared to go to Boston! I believe you haven’t got the gumption to stand up before that old scoundrel Chase!” He sighed and his voice quavered. “You remember your father, don’t you, my boy?”

“Leave my father out of it,” I said. “I’m not a half-witted Suffolk County jury, that goes all starry-eyed when you pour somebody’s aged father or gray-haired mother into its ears.”

“Is that so!” my uncle shouted. “I’ve only got your word for it that you’re not half-witted, and that’s not evidence! I’m talking about something that’s important to you, or ought to be, but you can’t get away from hay and manure and pigpens! A farmer can be a gentleman part of the time, at least; but you, by the Lord Harry, you’re helled and limed and harrowed and manured the whole damned time! Well, go ahead and stick your head into your lime and manure! I’m going to Boston if I have to be carried there on a stretcher and without a damned thing on me but Emmy’s lace pants—which you’ll soon be wearing yourself if you don’t stop talking like an old woman!”

I studied for a time. My uncle had made me really angry, no doubt of that. “Well,” I said finally, “I came pretty close to losing my temper just then. I guess we’d better stop arguing, because, if I had really lost it, hell nor high water couldn’t have got me to Boston!”

“You intended to go all the time, didn’t you?” my uncle asked.

“Oh, I suppose so,” I said slowly. “Though I don’t relish the idea of being put to a lot of trouble by a man I don’t give a damn about.”

“Listen, Albion,” my uncle said. “I’m afraid I went a little too far myself when I said that about hay and manure and pigpens. I didn’t mean a word of it. You’ve made a fine farm out of this place—and, since I know what it takes to do that, I can tell you something that’s as certain as death and taxes: you may think you don’t give a damn about Bailey; but you will when you talk to him. An injustice to one man is an injustice to you and to the whole world.”