Cape Cod (65 page)
“Especially to old men on Suicide Six.”
George stuffed a breadstick into Geoff’s mouth. “Don’t say that too loud. The walls may have ears. They certainly have some ugly fixtures.” George smiled up at the Humpster, who had pushed his way through the tables and smoke and now stood over them, all belly and beer breath.
“Blue Bayou” ended and “True Love Ways” began.
The Humpster gave that choke-a-dog grin and leaned over them. “Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub, a faggot, a Mo-nig, a fool.”
An old man at the next table looked up, then slid his plate of fried clams to the other side of his table. His wife twitched around to see what was going on.
“What did you call me?” said Jimmy.
“This is a family place. Let’s step outside and me and the boys’ll tell you there. We’ll tell you all about how tough it is when there’s no work because of faggots, Mo-nigs, and fools.”
“Mo-nig” could light Jimmy’s fuse faster than “Nance.” They were outnumbered, but Geoff knew that wouldn’t stop Jimmy now. “Easy,” whispered Geoff.
Jimmy slipped off his chair and looked the Humpster in the eye, even though he was a head shorter.
Geoff slid to the edge of the booth and prepared to spring. He noticed George slip his knife and fork into his hands and eye the roll of truck-stop kidney fat peeking out over the back of the Humpster’s belt. This wasn’t going to be pretty.
But this was a family place, the town hangout, and before anything else happened, the flannel shirt of Bill Rains appeared between the Humpster and Jimmy. He smiled at both of them. There was tartar sauce in his beard. “It is not a good day to die, Jim. And, Clarence, over in the corner is off-duty Brewster police officer Bob Shine, straightest arrow between here and the Mashpee Indian Museum. If he decides to administer field sobriety tests in the parking lot, you could lose your license for a year, under Massachusetts law. You couldn’t even drive a bulldozer.”
The Humpster’s big eyes roved around the room until he saw the cop, then he glugged the rest of his beer, almost in defiance. “Bulldozers. Yeah. We can’t live without them, can we? Bulldozers comin’ real soon to Jack’s Island.
Brrrrrmmmmm.”
He splattered his lips together and made the sound of an engine.
The old man at the next table put his napkin over his plate like an umbrella.
“Watch out for my bulldozer.” Using his beer bottle as a gear shift, the Humpster turned himself around and
brrrrrmmmmed
all the way back to the bar, where his three pals were laughing their asses off.
When the spit-mist had cleared, the old man took the napkin from his plate and looked up at Bill Rains. “Blue Bigelow says it all the time. His kid’s a stupid son of a bitch.”
“Yeah,” said Rains. “Too bad he’s so big.”
“We may cut him down to size.” Geoff threw a twenty on the table. “Him and John M. Nance.”
“Nance?” said Rains.
“So even the Conservation Commission doesn’t know?”
“Strip-the-Plants is in on this?” said Rains.
“Go finish your clams, Bill, before they get cold,” said Jimmy.
“And count on seeing us at Jack’s Island the day after tomorrow,” said Geoff.
“And, unh”—George put the knife and fork back on the table—“thanks. I don’t know what I was going to do with these.”
Buddy Holly sang “It’s So Easy.”
In the parking lot, Jimmy turned to his friends. “Okay, Rake may have known he was up against Nance along with the Bigelows. So he needed big medicine. So what happened three hundred and seventy years ago that matters today?”
“Whatever it was got him killed”—Geoff pulled the list from his pocket—“just when he was figuring it out.”
Jimmy studied the list and scratched his head.
George begged off. “I’ve done my share for the night, guys. And there’s a young man up in Provincetown who thinks ‘Legal Eagles’ is the best show on television.”
“Be careful,” said Jimmy.
“Don’t worry, James. These days I no longer rely on the kindness of strangers.”
“That’s not what I mean. Don’t trust
anyone
if Nance is around.”
“Better yet, stick around.” Geoff waved the list at him. “We could find the log if we put our heads together.”
George laughed. “Heads. Yeah. One in particular that I’m thinking about.”
The Humpster and his pals were coming out now. It was time to leave before any more trouble started.
George jumped into his Bronco and headed for P-town.
Jimmy drove Geoff back to Jack’s Island. And as the car crossed the causeway, Geoff felt the eloquence in a few extra glasses of beer. “I guess an Indian lawyer has to be the most careful guy on the block, but you know better than anybody what this island was, what all of the Cape was.”
“What?”
“Freedom. Thoreau said a man could stand here and put all of America behind him.”
“He said that about the outer beach, not Brewster. This town was built by hidebound Yankee shipmasters who would have laid Georgie’s backbone bare just because of who he was.”
“But the island, Jimmy… before the shipmasters, it meant freedom, for Indians, for Quakers.”
The headlights bumped along the road, skittered over the front of Rake Hilyard’s house, and lanced into the back.
Jimmy said, “No place meant freedom for Indians—Hey!”
In the glare of the headlights, a man raced out the door of Rake’s barn.
“Who’s that?” said Jimmy.
Geoff was already out of the car, running down the shaft of headlights into the woods behind the barn. “Hey!” he called, and he ran without thinking. The darkness closed in quickly around him. He stopped and tried to listen. All he could hear was Jimmy’s thrumming engine and the slop of the waves.
Then a thought cleared his brain and dropped him onto the path. He’d had an arrow shot at him. Somebody had killed Rake. Somebody could be taking aim at his white shirt right now. He waited for a time as his eyes adjusted. Then he rose to a crouch and saw a big black spot expand, right in front of him… but not in front of him,
inside
him. The blood and beer rushed so fast to his brain that he almost passed out.
He waited for the spot to fade. Then he heard footfalls behind him, pounding down the path from the house. Jimmy? He almost said the name. He saw a flash of nylon, a logo, a puma—then a knee struck him. His nose cracked and stars burst around it. He landed on his ass and grabbed the leg. Like steel cable. But Geoff held tight, and the man thudded onto the path, kicking cold sand into Geoff’s face.
Geoff leaped at him and an elbow caught him right in the sternum. This took both his wind and his enthusiasm and the man scrambled off. A moment later Geoff heard an outboard pull away. From the sound, it was heading toward Rock Harbor. He cursed and kicked the sand. But what would he have done if the guy had had a knife?
Jimmy was at the barn door, looking very angry. “Son of a bitch blind-sided me. I haven’t been blind-sided in years.”
He pointed to the trapdoor in the middle of the floor. “It looks like they went through the whole house, then came out here.”
Geoff aimed Rake’s work light into the hole.
“What’s down there?”
“Don’t know.” Geoff took a rusty old gaff from the wall, led with the tip, and lowered himself.
The ground crunched under his feet—mostly charcoal and shells. And the top sheet from a package of Polaroid film lay there. Somebody had taken a picture, somebody careless.
He tried to stand and banged his head on the floorboards. Charcoal… floorboards.
He pointed the light above him and saw strange marks, like letters, scratched into the wood. Beside them was a drawing that looked like a drinking cup. And words, very faint, almost gone: “God Bless the good Bigelows, God damn the bad and God bless our baby.”
“My sentiments exactly,” said Jimmy.
“ ‘Nance, Iron Axe, and charcoal on the floorboards.’ That’s it, whatever it means.”
Jimmy dropped into the hole beside him. “That cup looks like the Big Dipper—the Drinkin’ Gourd. That’s what runaway slaves called it. Follow the lip of the Drinking Gourd to the North Star and you’ll be free.”
October 1850
September 18 had been a black day. Of that Nancy Drake Rains had no doubt. President Fillmore had signed the Fugitive Slave Law, thus violating a higher law that no politician could compromise.
Nancy Drake Rains: Cape Cod aristocracy of the first salt. Her husband’s memorial stone stood on a plot in the Dennis cemetery, though his body lay at the bottom of a distant sea. Her father descended from James Drake, who in 1660 had bought up a thousand acres of Monomoyick land in what was to become Chatham, for a small boat and a greatcoat. Her maternal grandfather, as far as she knew, had been the famous Eldredge Dickerson. And her grandmother’s name, Hannah Bigelow Dickerson, echoed back to the
Mayflower
itself.
There could be no finer pedigree for a young widow of thirty-six with two growing sons, none finer in a young nation searching for a sense of its own past, a nation that had come to define 1620 as the moment of its spiritual conception. The First Comers had always been revered in the Old Colony, but as the nineteenth century unfolded, they had grown in stature across America.
Nancy remembered the bicentenary of the Pilgrim landing and Daniel Webster, then a young man of mighty voice, proclaiming, “Who would wish that his country’s existence had otherwise begun?… Who would wish for other… ornaments of her genealogy, than to be able to say, that her first existence was with intelligence; her first breath the inspirations of liberty; her first principle the truth of divine religion?”
On that day, Webster turned a bedraggled band of religious rebels and fortune seekers into the ancestors of the American ideal, and he made Plymouth Rock the touchstone of American myth. That was good, thought Nancy later, because a nation built upon a lie needed its myths to remember its ideals.
After Webster had praised the Pilgrims, he unleashed his fury upon slavery. “I hear the sound of the hammer, I see the smoke of the furnace where the manacles and fetters are forged for human limbs. I see the visages of those, who by stealth and at midnight, labor in this work of hell, foul and dark.”
Not all of America had heard the hammer or seen the smoke, however, because the wind of commerce blew a hurricane that sometimes carried conscience before it. Despite the ports into which commerce had blown her vessels and the prosperity they had brought back, the Cape where Nancy grew up had remained a close-bred place. On occasion, a pair like the Doone brothers blossomed forth. But in the main, the twining of the old names had produced a forest of families, hardheaded and Protestant to the core, whose roots held the land in place where the trees were gone. And in such earth, conscience sometimes thrived.
Many Cape shipmasters, among them Nancy’s late husband, had risked lives and livelihoods to smuggle living cargo from the slave states to ports on the south side of the Cape. No manifest mentioned this cargo, because it was always hidden in steerage until a vessel was well out to sea. And no customs officer taxed it because, in Massachusetts, no price could be put upon human life.
Of course, not all Cape Codders believed that slavery was their concern, any more than their use of herring for fertilizer should be the concern of the Georgia planter. Many of the churches of the Cape—indeed, of the nation—refused to condemn a practice that brought Negroes to Christ, no matter the fashion. Some even considered the theft of a Negro a greater crime than his enslavement.
But until the Compromise of 1850, slaves were free when they reached ports like Hyannis or Harwich. They could take themselves to Mashpee and mingle with the Indians there. Or they could cross to a bay-shore town like Barnstable and continue their journey aboard a north-coasting schooner.
But, to avert civil war, Daniel Webster had acceded to Henry Clay’s compromise. California would join the Union as a free state, the territories of New Mexico and Utah would decide the issue on their own, and the Fugitive Slave Law would be enacted, so that any runaway in any state could be apprehended and remanded.
In Boston, three thousand Whig merchants signed pledges of support for the compromise. At the same time, abolitionists created a Committee of Vigilance to watch the docks for southern slave catchers. The pivotal moment had come for men and women of conscience, among whose number Nancy counted herself and her grandmother, founder of the Barnstable Anti-Slavery Society.
“Your Dennis Methodists have been a disappointment.” Hannah Bigelow Dickerson sat by the window in her upstairs sitting room. She was now eighty-seven and had outlived her daughter and any affectation but a stiff spine. She wore a simple brown dress, a yellow shawl, and a net on her white hair. People were still struck, however, by the stern brown eyes and the brows which had remained dark, even into old age.
Nancy had her grandmother’s eyes but hair as black as mussel shell and skin translucent white, untouched by the sun that leathered most Cape wives. She did not deny that she had been more pampered than most, but now that she had taken up the task of her late husband, she would not falter.
She fluffed a pillow and leaned back on the new settee. “The congregation denied a slave permission to speak from the pulpit, so one parishioner marched in and tore his pew right out of the floor.”
Hannah laughed. “I hear that
you’ve
decided to leave as well and become a Come-Outer.”
“A Come-Outer of the new style.”
“No fence-walking and singsong for you, I hope.” Hannah looked into the road, where Nancy’s two sons played at kick-the-can. “It wouldn’t do them any good.”
“A Come-Outer of conscience.”
The first Come-Outers had followed the call of evangelists who urged them to come out of their hidebound churches and express their faith in every aspect of their lives. The result seemed more affliction than religion. When the spirit was upon them, Come-Outers spoke in strange voices, walked fences, swung from trees, and sang their talk, like characters from Gilbert and Sullivan.
