Читать книгу Fire and the Hammer - Shirley Barker - Страница 5

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November, thought Hester Doan, is the time of fulfillment, the time when all things turn to the earth again; when the bright leaves have all come down and begun to moulder in the brown grass, when men move abroad in the fields and among the dry cornstalks to cut back the vines and stems of living plants that they may sleep secure in the root the winter through, that there may again be spring. November can be mild or sharp, blue or somber; it can wear the face of any season; but whatever masks it assumes or promises it holds forth, its own essence is of decay and death. The eternal sadness of it struck Hester suddenly, as she looked out across the fields of Plumstead in Bucks County of Pennsylvania, and watched her five sons plowing the land, but she put it from her, and remembered God had been good, and gave Him the thanks thereof.

A wind sang sharply through the oak grove behind the fields, and lifted the red dust of the Easton Road that wound past Joseph Doan’s stone and timber farmhouse on the way from Cross Keys Tavern up to Plumstead village and beyond. In the warmth of the raftered kitchen, Joseph’s violin was singing, too; the song of a boiling kettle full of side meat and herbs in proper portion, the song that had in it all the sounds of autumn dark coming down on the farmland—cattle lowing by the milk pails, dry stalks a-rustle, and hogs crunching down corn in the frosty moonlight. Hester smiled gently. She knew other men on the farms around who could fiddle, too; dance tunes and hymn tunes, the hearty airs of the German farmers up past Deep Run and Swamp Meeting House, but only Joseph could fiddle cricket music and cackling geese, and bees going in and out of the wild honeysuckle. When she had come to this house first time, a bride, she had felt wonder and gratitude that of all the pretty girls in Pennsylvania, she was the girl to marry Joseph Doan. Thirty years and nine childbirths afterward, she still felt so; still felt, God forgive her, a girl’s silly pride that bearing had not thickened her slight waist, nor trouble silvered her soft, black hair.

She looked away from the house and fields, down the valley to the south—a long, mellow groove between the curving ridges that ran east to the Delaware. At its bottom coiled the north branch of Neshaminy, brown and still between the willow hedges, and across, on Clover Hill, she could see the thick trees clustered north of Plumstead Meeting House and the smaller stone cottage close by it, where her second son, Joseph, named for his father, used to teach counting and Dilworth’s speller. He had once told her that he read to his scholars every week or so out of George Fox’s Journal, so the boys growing up under him could see how a man and a Friend should grow. Hester sighed. She did not think that young Joe read much from George Fox in these days.

She could hear him now, jeering across the field at his elder brother.

“Hey, Mose! Straighten her up, there! Thee’s weaving like a damn adder!”

Hester winced at the oath. Not among Friends, such speech. And worse, there had been a note in his voice, a tilt to his head more profane than the words he uttered. The other farm wives roundabout had sons who were mild and easy-mannered, whose ways were like the gently sloping valleys they lived in. Why must her sons be wild and strange, like the rough, craggy ravines by Delaware, and all the great, wild woods behind? Sworn to spill hearts’ blood with the rifle before they’d turn the other cheek.

The wind cut sharper now through the chilly autumn dusk, turned up the leaves that still clung to the giant sycamores crowding round the mortar-and-pebble springhouse where Hester stood.

But they are ours, she thought proudly, knowing her pride was wicked, but feeling the need of it to lean on, and they will follow the Light—I know they will, for they were taught so. Only—they do not see it as we do. But they are young.

She looked steadfastly up the field with the russet wood behind it and the purpling sunset behind that. Moses, her eldest, was coming straight for her, his head flung back and the black hair tossed away from his dark, ruddy face, his great shoulders held stiff, and his great hands gripping the plow handles behind the heaving ox. Only Moses liked to plow the old way. Her other boys liked better to guide the deft-hoofed horses who could tread a field in half the time. Of all her boys it was Moses who liked best the old ways in everything; who listened longest to Grandsir Israel’s blasphemous tales of the days when he and his brother had been the gay blades of Newtown and Four Lanes’ End, read out of Middletown Meeting fifty years ago. Perhaps it was from old Israel that the wild blood had come, or perhaps from older Doans than he, strange, black, warrior men in England, she’d heard—the very name meant darkness—before the light of God woke in them and brought them to the Meeting. Fighters back to the days of King John, whoever he might be. Hester’s own folk had settled Makefield way in the days of William Penn, and as far as she knew, they had always been Friends in standing, no worse than their neighbors, and she doubted if much better. There was something in her boys, a power that frightened her, a strangeness and a violence that was certainly not in any blood she gave them, that must have come somehow through their gentle Quaker father, carpenter, maker of fine moldboard plows, who loved to play the violin. They were hasty and passionate, hot and cold, proud and sensitive, grievously upset over little things, like the shadow of a leaf blown across the grass. She had borne them, surely, and she loved them, but she had had little part in their making. She had been only the cradle where they lay awhile.

Young Joe stood now at the edge of the field, on the ragged sods cast up by the plow’s turning, as he shouted to Moses to straighten the furrow that looked straight to her already. If Joe was thinner, brighter, more sharply mocking than Moses, it was by a hair’s breadth measure. Not every man could tell the two apart. Or Joe from Aaron, or Aaron again from Levi. But Joe always had the best-combed hair, and his tailored suits from Philadelphia bulged with the books he carried in his pockets. At the top of the ridge, on the last field toward Plumstead, Aaron and Levi were toiling now, boys like Moses in form and coloring, but no more like him, really, than a dark window is like a lighted one. Moses would lead them always, and Joe would be thrust and spur to quicken that leadership. Levi and Aaron would follow into evil and good, the one, alas, as quick as the other. But beyond these four, beyond Betsy and Polly and the younger children, beyond them was Mahlon, her fifth son, and Mahlon she would not answer for, for she had known him least of all, even in the days of his depending childhood.

“My boys,” she said, musing aloud to God who walked always by her like a familiar household presence, and to the mottled sycamores and the first thin starlight, “my boys may curse and plunder and do otherwise than Friends, but they are strong men when they walk abroad.” My boys, she thought, are like the panther and the mountain lion. But Mahlon—he is like the wild deer we never tame or know.

Beyond the plowland, now, back in the tangled oakwood that swept northwest of Plumstead toward Grandsir Israel’s, a rifle cracked. That would be Mahlon’s. That would mean squirrel or rabbit stew tomorrow noon. The other boys would turn to the plow handles or the cattle stalls sometimes, but not Mahlon. The gun grew in his hand and the deerskin hunting shirt on his back. Dear God, thought Hester, they are home now, and the wickedness is over, and they may never be quite like the good, kind men in the Meeting—never quite like Joseph—but oh—if Thee would look out on them as they stand now—and keep them always from any worse than that!

She pushed back the low-swung boughs, filled her wooden bucket under the straw-thatched roof, and thought to go in where the violin spoke out now in the language of corn growing in the soft summer night when all men who are men want to make love, but something stopped her. The click of a slipper heel on the paving Joseph had set with so much labor round the kitchen door so she would not mire her shoes when the rainwater gathered there, the swish of a skirt through the stiff grasses and dead rose haws. She turned around and faced her sister, Rachel. Rachel was married to Joseph’s younger brother, and lived on the old family place the other side of Plumstead, with Grandsir Israel, that merry, wicked one, who held up all the family by the breeches band, and laughed and over-drank and swore, and spoke out masterly well in Meeting, and didn’t see why such ways couldn’t belong to a Friend and a man.

“Hester,” said Rachel, quick and short, the way sisters can speak to each other with no edging on, though her face showed she was going to speak trouble, “Hester, they’ve begun it again. Here. Close by home.”

Hester looked straight back at Rachel, as dark and as slim as she, with more lines in her face though she was the younger; that because her sickly husband hadn’t been able to carry his share of the burden, the way Joseph had.

“They—they have? Is thee sure?”

“We was afeard they would.”

“I know. Thee better tell me.”

“It was last night. In Bedminster.”

Last night, thought Hester. She had put the children to bed. The boys had ridden out. She had mended Levi’s hunting shirt and gathered a cambric flounce for Polly’s First Day petticoat, while Joseph whittled on a wooden porringer. They had snuffed the candles early and slept sound till daybreak. Last night? Last night her boys could have been—anywhere. She felt terror shaking in her like an ague as she stared into the eyes of Rachel Doan who had been Rachel Vickers. Together they had washed naked in the Makefield brooks and wept and giggled under one counterpane half the night over the Doan boys, when Joseph and the younger Israel were the Doan boys in courting days. Rachel had shared much with her and shared this trouble now.

“What happened—in Bedminster?”

“William Darrah. Thee knows him.”

“Why—why—a good man and a Friend. Did they—did they harm William Darrah?”

Both women looked up the hill to the plowings. The rifle cracked again in the blackening oakwood from which the sunlight had quite gone. The young men called crude jests across the furrows. A worm fence twisted along the upper edge of the cleared land, and over it now leaped a black bear of a man. Abraham Doan, Rachel’s son. Gaunt and lowering, he strode toward his cousins.

“Oh!” cried Hester, low and sharp. “My boys—my boys and Abraham!”

“Thee needn’t be so pure about ‘thy boys,’ ” mocked Rachel, her black eyes snapping. “Abe’s what he is, true, but I don’t know that I’ve heard thy Mose was much better. ’Twas he helped the British at Long Island. Abe was home.”

“He wasn’t either. He was over in Jersey stealing horses. But William Darrah! I know his wife. She showed me how to soften chestnuts for a goosebelly pudding when I was first married and couldn’t boil water without I burned it. She—”

Her sister interrupted. “Thy boys rode out after supper, didn’t they, Hester?”

“Yes—”

She saw in her mind the five, great black horses, each a carefully groomed pet—Moses’ Wild Devil and Mahlon’s Firebrand—wheeling out of the stone-faced barn; saw their riders stoop to pass under the sycamore branches; heard the beat of hoofs die away in the muffling white mist that poured up from Neshaminy.

“So did Abe. They don’t hold with tax gatherers, thee knows.”

“And William was one—new-appointed. I’d forgotten that. Why did he let them make him a tax gatherer and set himself up to rob his neighbors? What did our boys do?”

“Hush! We won’t allow our boys did anything—for naught can be proven. But it happened so. Last night thieves rode up to his house, tall men moving in the thick shadow, and first they shot out the lamps so there was no light to see them by, save the cook fire, and no one could name them. They came on shouting, ‘We will take nothing except what belongs to the Congress!’ ”

“Oh, that Congress! It’s a trouble to our hearts and a pox on Pennsylvania!”

“Thee’s really a Tory then? Thee and Joseph? Thee’s both got the name of it, way to Buckingham. But I’ve denied—”

“No. Not Tory. Not the other thing. We’re Friends, and we’ve got God’s plenty all around us and His peace in our hearts. We don’t see what’s to fight for. We won’t do it, nor pay to have it done.”

“Well, in Bedminster—I won’t spare thee, Hester—they tied him down, tied his wrists together. They asked him where he’d hid the tax money, money the farmers round had brought in for Washington’s army.”

“There’s blood on money like that! Before our boys ever touched it—if they did touch it—there was blood on it.”

“He wouldn’t tell them. He prayed them to leave him alone and think of their poor country torn all ways with war, but they cursed and said the country wouldn’t be so, if it wasn’t for men like him.”

“I’ve heard Joseph speak the same of tax collectors.”

“I told thee they bound his wrists. When he wouldn’t tell, they took live coals off the hearth and heaped them in his cupped hands like apples in a bowl. Thee can still smell burnt flesh if thee rides past there, so Israel heard this noon in Plumstead Tavern. Anyway, he finally told, poor man, and they took the money—God knows Bedminster’s a lean town and couldn’t spare it—and rode off in the night singing and shouting, leaving him bloody and half afire. Our boys, Hester!”

“Be thee sure?”

“Isn’t thee?”

Neither spoke for a few moments. Rachel looked down at the fallen leaves on the pavement, and Hester looked at the white moon riding wanly up over Plumstead Meeting House.

“What shall we do, Hester? We who love them.”

“I—I don’t know. Except hold by our own. How is Abraham? He never comes in to visit with me and Joseph now. Shouts for the boys, and waits for them in the yard, and mutters.”

“I—he—he won’t ever be himself again, I’m afraid. Thee never saw Deborah?”

“No, but I heard Abe talk about her before—before it happened. She must have been fair.”

“Oh, she was fair enough. Hair all marigold color and soft as a cobweb. But it wasn’t all her fairness. There’s plenty girls are fair right here in Plumstead. He didn’t have to go to Philadelphia for that. A woman has to have more than looks for a man, thee knows, and what he found in Deborah I’m afraid he won’t ever find again.”

“Won’t time help him? And other girls?”

“Thee’s heard how he treats other girls—now.”

Hester shuddered. “Yes, I’ve heard. I even keep my eye to Polly when he’s about. His own cousin.”

“Thee’d better. Then we won’t both be sorry. He thinks that because she was used so and died of it, it’s his right and duty to treat all others as bad, or worse.”

“Whom does he blame?”

“He seems to blame the whole world. But he’s bitterest against those who call themselves ‘Patriots’ and ‘Liberty Boys,’ who’ve set up this group to goose-gabble and named it Congress.’ ”

“And given men their blessing to steal from other men and call it tax-collecting.”

“Aye. They’re all mired in the same pit. My Abe’s against it, and thy boys are, too. I’m afraid for them, Hester. I dreamed last night they were all dead men, laying a-row in the sod beyond Plumstead Meeting House. But before that happens—I’m afraid—there’ll be others die.”

“Dreams are the whisperings of Satan in the night season. Thee’d better get some ancient Friend to pray with thee and Abraham.”

“Had I? The same that prays with thy Mose, no doubt. I’ve heard ’tis he leads our boys when they go thieving.”

“Did thee now? Whom does he thieve from?”

“Why—why—the Patriots and Congress.”

“A set of idlers with nothing to do but gabble and rob honest men, as thee thyself just said. I’ll hear no talk against him till he’s done worse than that. Tell me, Rachel, where does thee and thy household stand in this, and what does Grandsir say? Would he change the King for the Congress and favor men killing each other for this new kingdom they’re setting up?”

Rachel drew away, confused, unhappy, having delivered her ill news and being eager to get back over the rough fields while there was still light enough to see by, feeling the milk heavy in her bosom, and remembering Leah, her two months child.

“Grandsir says leave things as they are. He’s seen them this way near eighty years, and he’s got no cause to want them different. We—a few Friends—are making a purse for William Darrah—”

“For him to spend on his own condition or give to the Congress?”

“So he can go to Philadelphia and have Dr. Rush heal his burns.”

“Then Joseph and I will give. The same sum as others.”

“I thought thee would. Someone from Meeting will ride by for it in a day or two. Good night—Sister—”

For a moment their years of wisdom and assurance fell away from them and two frightened and troubled young girls peered into each other’s eyes in the starlight under the dying leaves.

“Good night.”

Rachel went up the road toward Plumstead, picking her way in the twilight, and Hester watched her, feeling defenseless, empty as a drawn gourd. The evil wasn’t over then, the nightmare that had begun just after the turn of the year in frozen January.

First had come Sam Bye, a young man in a fine, plum-colored coat, plump and rosy, heir to a rich farm and stone buildings at the foot of Buckingham Mountain, knocking on the door, saying he was a tax collector and wanted money for the Congress. Joseph had asked him mildly to come in for some perry or cider and tell them what was the Congress, but Moses stood behind Joseph with his rifle down, and said to hell with the Congress. Sam Bye had made black scratches with sharp charcoal on a sheet of foolscap and gone away. Then the surveyors from Newtown had come, and trod the field over, and said the little strip below the duck pond that always grew such fine clover didn’t belong to them any more—that it belonged to Pennsylvania because the Doans wouldn’t pay their taxes; that all men hereabout who wouldn’t go to war had to pay taxes to those who would, whether they liked it or not.

Hester had asked God under the sycamores, under the low beams of Plumstead Meeting House, what was this new power that could take their fields away, but He had not answered her. Likely Himself didn’t know. It was something men had thought up to busy themselves about for a little while; better sport than hoeing bean rows or getting in harvest, the right concerns of a man. Hadn’t the Assembly, in the days when it was made up of tried and worthy Friends, published it abroad that the setting up and putting down of governments was God’s peculiar prerogative?

But from then on life had slid all awry and she had found no way to put it back. There had been trouble. Trouble in Philadelphia between the great merchants and the leather-apron men in their little booths along the streets and common and river. Once, bold and open, in the daytime, a mob dragged Dr. Kearsley out of his own door on Front Street, tore his hand open with a bayonet, and rode him off in a cart singing “The Rogues’ March” and yelling for tar and feathers. They ransacked his house after, bringing terror to his niece, the fragile Deborah Mave, Abe Doan’s sweetheart, lying ill in bed there, and that terror had brought on death that might or might not have been ready to claim her anyway. Abe had not learned of it till her own folk had taken her home to Merion and buried her by the Meeting House, but since then he had been morose, full of brooding anger, withdrawing himself further and further away from the world happier men lived in. And even that world kept going wrong.

All men’s thoughts seemed to run crisscross, like the whirls and eddies in Delaware, and every last mother’s son of them seemed to be sure his own way of thought was worth shouting and spilling blood for. King George was suddenly to blame for everything, from a sick hog, to rain on the hay harvest, to a daughter marrying out of Meeting. Next came word that they were fighting somewhere—out beyond Bucks County; towns she had never heard of, in a place called Massachusetts.

Grandsir Israel had heard of Massachusetts, and he sucked his gums wetly behind his white beard as he told them, shrill and wise, how his father had come from there before he was born; come near three hundred miles of swamps and rivers in an ox-cart, with a wife and four baby children, all to get free of a church he didn’t like, and live with Friends in Friends’ country. That he’d been read out of Meeting later for meddling in astrology didn’t matter—he’d seen Massachusetts as a Quaker’d see it, and he didn’t like it. Grandsir said it was an ill land, and he didn’t care what happened to it. Hester had not been troubled then either. Her menfolk were Friends, and Friends let wars go by them. They do not hinder or abet. They abide with their own concerns. But again Sam Bye came knocking on the door, wanting more money.

This time Joseph joined with his sons in saying they would not pay men to kill each other; that he saw no need for wars and new governments, nor for him to pay taxes to them.

Sam Bye asked him if he would rather pay taxes to King George.

Joseph replied that he saw no need to pay either; that King George only taxed tea, and stamps, and sugar, and trifles a man could do without; he could do without lead and glass, even.

Sam asked him did he not stand with trade, said that King George wanted to hamper our shipping.

Joseph said Bucks County could live of itself if not a sail stirred from now till the end of the world; that the trees bore till the weight of their fruit broke the branches down, that the old fields still gave new corn.

“Once,” said Sam, not in anger but temperate still, for Sam was a Friend, “thee could have thought that way, Brother, and been let alone in it. But things are different—now blood’s been spilt. Once thee’d have had a right to stand aloof—but now—”

And Mahlon had put down the violin—he was the only one of the boys who knew how to play it—and called from the kitchen hearthside, “He’s selling what he calls ‘Free America,’ Father! Don’t buy any. I’d rather have part share in the northern lights than his ways of freedom where all men march in line, hayfoot, strawfoot!”

“Go home,” Joseph had told Sam finally, “and plow thy own furrows for a living, and get thy Meeting to pray for thee. I’m agin all taxations.”

So Sam had gone, and the surveyors had come again and paced out the rich black meadow along the Neshaminy, and said it did not belong to Joseph Doan any more. It belonged to she Congress. Joseph did not plow it that year, neither did anyone else, but it grew a noble crop of wire grass and thistles without, which nobody came up from Philadelphia to reap.

Next thing that happened was, she waked up one morning and the boys were gone, all five of them, down through Mahlon. Joseph knew where and shook his head but he would not tell her. All summer she did not see them, and word went from farm to farm of great battles moving ever closer. Once they heard of a battle lost, at a place called Long Island somewhere east of the Jerseys, and Moses, some said, had been there and served the British as a spy in it. Some men praised Moses when they heard the story, and some spat if his name was mentioned, but the country Friends said little, and came to pray with Hester and Joseph.

In the fall the boys came back, but now all Plumstead, down to Wrightstown even, seemed to know something ill of them that she didn’t know, that she learned slowly. Sometimes in the store at Buckingham where she went to buy quilted cotton for a petticoat, sometimes in Doyle’s Tavern when she was selling eggs and roasting ears, the whispers came to her.

“At Long Island. Thee’s heard? A thousand men were killed—some of them good men like us, bred in Bucks County. The stench of their corpses goes up all over New York Bay so folk there scarce can breathe. And Moses Doan helped kill them.”

“The Doans steal every horse they can come by, from Montgomery to Hudson side, and drive them off to sell to our enemies, the British.”

“They stole the taxes in Newark. Taxes gathered to pay the army that’s fighting to free us all. My boy’s in it—writes he has no gun and his feet are bare. Yours, too? I thought so. Levi Doan, that was. Aped a drunkard till he found out where Squire Shelton hid his collectings; tied him up and tickled the bottoms of his feet with feathers until he told.”

“The Doans! The Tory Doans! The Bucks County Robbers! Mad Dog Doans! Hell itself can’t match them! Hang them all!”

“Joseph,” she asked her husband, taking her trouble to him when she could bear it no longer, the way she had done for thirty years, “tell me. What have our boys done? They are not fighting in the war. Not out spilling blood with that Washington. They have come home to live with us as Friends. What is happening in this country? I do not understand it.”

He had tried to tell her, not quite knowing himself. “Hester, the times are ill; times in which a man must choose between life and death, and few of us wise enough to tell the one from the other. Our boys have chosen—wrong, perhaps. They have committed violence and outrage, as our neighbors see it. Even now they are planning more. But they do not do so for lust, or greed, or viciousness. They are moved by the inner light. They are called to save America. So they tell me, and I believe.

“I had to make a choice too when I was a young man. Does thee remember the old Indian wars when we were called to go and save the Scotchmen on the frontier?”

“Aye. When I was a new wife and the children small.”

“Some of our Meeting fought in it, and others gave money, believing it was the will of God and done to preserve our homes. But I did not. I was moved otherwise. I have never had aught to do with wars, and I never will. We Doans have fought before, but it does not become us, and too often we lose. It was so in England, my Grandsir Daniel told me, when we followed the red rose of Lancaster.”

“What was that?”

“If he told me, I disremember. But God’s voice has spoken in our boys more strong and terrible, appointed them vessels of greater strength than most men are charged to bear. They affirm, to a man, that the God who bid Abraham sacrifice his son in Moriah has bid them stain their own souls with crime to keep a greater crime away. I do not understand. God has not confirmed them in truth to me, nor shown me how to deal with them. But until he does—I shall hold by our own blood.”

“What—what is the greater crime?”

“Mahlon says, and as Mahlon is the quietest, so his wisdom is more when he does speak, he says these armies have arisen to destroy the free America we’ve always known. He says the men who shout loudest about freedom are the ones who want to take freedom away.”

“I—I see what he means. Nobody spoke of freedom much. We had it without knowing. We were so sure it didn’t matter. And then came a burst of noise about it—men marching with torches and beating their neighbors—tax collectors like locusts in the heat—”

“Hester,” Joseph had said then, taking her hand for a moment and letting it drop, reminding her thus of all the love between them, “scan thy own heart. God may reveal it there for both of us.”

But as yet God had not spoken.

Suddenly she realized that she still stood holding the pail of water, and that Rachel’s plodding figure had vanished beyond the bare ridge under the pale sky. Joseph’s violin had gone silent in the kitchen, and through the half-open door came a streak of yellow lamplight and the sputter and smell of sausages frying.

Down the field the boys trooped home to supper.

She watched them all, Moses, Joe, Aaron, and Levi; tall men, dark and shaggy, coming on with great strides, like moving towers of bone and muscle. She watched Mahlon, half a foot shorter, stepping so lightly across the furrows he hardly seemed to disturb a blade of grass as he passed over; a slender, wiry lad, just nineteen, with sleek, black hair, and a habit of looking always down—because of a fleck in one of his brown eyes and a little scar beneath it, where a hazel bough had struck him in the face once in his boyhood as he raced through the woodland. Again she thought of the wild deer in the groves above Neshaminy.

“Dear God,” she whispered into the silver branches drooping round her in the dusk, “dear God—for my boys—let them do no more harm to any living thing.”