Cape Cod (74 page)

The beach around it was littered with cut lumber, barrels, spars, rigging, and the broken body of an old Negro with an axe in his belt.

“Dead,” shouted Pervis above the roar of the surf. “Let’s save his mates.” He ordered Tom to stay ashore and prepare the Lyle gun. Then he called for the surfboat.

Cape Cod surfmen were, by instinct and training, the best small boatmen in the world. They had drilled the launch hundreds of times, performed it under these conditions dozens more. With a few quick commands, Captain Pervis directed the boat up over one wave, into the trough of the next, and turned for the ship.

But for all their skill, surfmen needed luck, and halfway to the ship, Pervis’s luck deserted him. He rode the side of a ten-foot comber, up and up, straight up until the boat seemed to be standing on its stern. Then, like a ballerina on a music box, the boat did a little pirouette and came down broadside in the trough.

Tom could not see what was happening. But over the roar of wind and surf, he heard the almost human shrieks of splitting wood. The schooner was breaking up. Her crew would be taking to the masts. If they weren’t rescued, they would freeze in the rigging, then drop one by one into the sea, or remain until morning, like icicles hanging from a leaky downspout.

But where was the surfboat?

There. In the surf itself, spat from a wave like a bone from the mouth of a great woolly dog.

Tom’s stomach turned. He reminded himself of his training. He could rig the breeches buoy himself if he had to.

But training and cork life belts helped surfmen to survive in the surf, and Captain Pervis soon came cursing out of the waves, followed by Ellis and Baker, then Kimball, all save Parker. And there was no time to hunt for him, because the death shrieks of the schooner were growing louder. Without waiting for orders, Tom fired the gun.

Its rocket flared through the storm like a shooting star, trailing line that snagged perfectly in the schooner’s rigging. Attached was a hawser, whip block, and tally board, which read: “Fix to lower mast, well up. If masts are gone, then to best place you can find. Cast off rocket line. See that rope in block runs free and show signal to shore.”

Meanwhile, the surfmen raised a V-shaped frame to create a pulley between ship and shore. Despite frigid water and ice that froze in their mustaches, they worked well, for they had trained well. When the signal flare showed above the ship, they hung the breeches buoy on the line and, one by one, hauled the survivors over the furious sea.

Two were black men, which was unusual. The third looked to be brava, a Cape Verde islander, descended from Portagee criminals and African slaves. He was the mate and, though shivering uncontrollably, was able to tell them that captain and cook had gone over the side. Then he saw the body of the Negro on the horse cart. He went over to it, tenderly touched the face.

Tom threw a blanket around his shoulders. “The cook?”

“Yep,” said the man, “and part owner of the
Dorothea N
., named for his late wife. This was Mr. Jacob Nance.”

“Make a report when we get back to the station,” said Pervis. “Let’s move afore we all freeze.”

The man slipped the axe from Jake Nance’s belt. “He cut loose the deck load. We thought we might float free if we wasn’t carryin’ so much. But when we pushed the lumber off, he went with it.”

“Should save the axe for the next of kin,” said Pervis.

“I
am
the next of kin. Name’s Samuel Isaac Nance.”

Tom looked at the black body on the horse cart. Then he held up his lantern and looked into the blue eyes before him.

Mighty strange, he thought. But his puzzlement was forgotten when pain, pure and excruciating, exploded before his eyes. The wagon had gone over his foot, a common enough occurrence and harmless in the sand. But beneath the sand was a rock, rolled there by the waves, buried there by tide, the perfect anvil on which to shatter Tom Hilyard’s instep.

He spent two months in the hospital and suffered through three operations. To speed the time, he drew. Sometimes the drawing distracted him from his pain. Sometimes he drew with pain popping sweat beads all over his face. But he never stopped drawing, because he sensed that now he would
have
to draw.

When the doctors were finished with him, his left foot was no more than a few twisted shards of bone to be dragged painfully along wherever he went. He could never trudge miles of beach or help his mates in the surf again, and so he was dropped from the service. That was the way of things. His salary of sixty-five dollars a month—plus twenty cents a day for food—was gone. But there was an old saying—most often used when things went irretrievably wrong—that where God closed a door, he opened a window. The wreck of the
Dorothea N
. had closed the door on his foot but opened a window onto his new career.

Soon after, there appeared in
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
a story called “Bravery at Cape Cod,” featuring engravings made from “genuine eyewitness drawings of seashore tragedy, done by one of the staunch rescuers himself.” Tom had sent many drawings to the pictorial weeklies before, but they had always been rejected.

“This story,” the editors wrote him, “shows the terrible price lifesavers may pay when they seek to outwit Neptune. Yet they pay it with bravery and resourcefulness, the stuff of nobility. Besides, this is the first time anyone has sketched a surfman an hour before his death. The public will lap it up.”

A drawing of Jeff Parker appeared at the top of the page. He looked calm and relaxed, not a trace of foreshadowing on his face. His sou’wester was pushed back jauntily on his head, his chaw bulged in his right cheek, and every hair of his mustache stood out. The caption read “Bravery in Repose.”

Beneath it were drawings of the surfboat riding a wave, the breeches buoy, and most touching of all, the body of a white-haired Negro on a horse cart, and his son removing the axe from his belt. The caption read, “A Father’s Final Gift.” The engravers had given the son more Negroid features than Tom had. Their vision of Samuel Isaac Nance had huge lips, rolling eyes, torn trousers, and looked more like a character from Uncle Remus than a brave seaman.

The relationship between Tom’s parents and the dead cook Jacob Nance never came to light. The New York writer interviewed the lifesavers, but the survivors had shipped back to Nova Scotia—except for Samuel Isaac Nance himself.

Had anyone bothered to ask, he could have told the story of his parents’ flight in 1850, though he knew nothing of his father’s brief desertion. A reporter might then have asked if the Hilyards who saved his parents were related to the one who saved
him
, and the story would have become the sensation of 1885. But no one asked and Samuel Isaac Nance did not read
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated
.

When the story appeared, Nance was aboard a Provincetown Grand Banker. He had chosen not to return to Nova Scotia and the backers who believed the
Dorothea N
. was insured. He had also fallen for the daughter of a Portuguese fishing captain and hoped that, with his light skin and blue eyes, he might pass for something he was not.

For his part, Tom Hilyard remembered the tale of his mother’s first slave run, but he had never been told of its sad conclusion or the name the slaves had taken. Besides, a new career awaited him, and he began to draw everything he saw for the illustrated weeklies.

But the weeklies didn’t need everything he saw. They had photographers who could take their new lightweight Eastman cameras anywhere, make their pictures, then pass them on to staff engravers who rendered photographic truth in line. So Tom took his savings, his broken foot, his palette of oils, and moved to the old house on Billingsgate… and he painted.

He filled hundreds of canvases. In winter he took the train to Boston to see the works of the masters and the wonders of the French school called Impressionism. In summer he went to Provincetown to meet the men of the Boston Paint and Clay Club. He called himself an American Impressionist and painted some more, but no one noticed.

“Progress passes me by,” he told his aunt Ruth on a Thanksgiving visit two years later. “
I
see with paint and pencil. The world prefers chemicals and photographic plates.”

“Pr-pr-progress cannot be st-st-stopped, Tom.” Her hands worked steadily at the squash on the cutting board. A black stove sat in the hearth and the stovepipe ran up the flue. Heat and good smells steamed the windows.

Ruth was now eighty-one, and her eyes seemed to gaze toward ever more distant horizons. Of course, to Tom, she had aged little since his return from the war. She had been as lined and gray at fifty-eight, as concerned with the neatness of the house, as obsessed with the long strands of hair she was always shaping, the braids of the children she never had.

“Can’t be stopped,” repeated Tom sadly.

“So you d-d-d-do things to move ahead. Find yourself a good w-w-w-woman and switch to engraving.”

Tom scratched out the sketch he had made of her. She always mentioned women when they talked. She could not understand that some men had no desire for them and denied whatever other desires they might have. But she meant well, and she was the only one who had ever loved him. He began to sketch her again.

“Y-y-you don’t want to grow old alone. I was lucky. I always had Ephraim and his family over on Nauseiput Creek. ’Course, his sons have notions of their own.”

Some Cape Cod brothers were as close as clams in a flat. Others were like high tide and low.

Ephraim’s older son, Zachary Hilyard, took after his late father, a big, slow, calculating kind of man who counted himself blessed at having Jack’s Island to live on and a fine wife to bear him children. He tilled the soil and worked the weirs, wore a fringe of whiskers around his face and held up his trousers with honest red braces.

His younger brother, Elwood, taller and pencil-thin, had chosen to shape his beard and his passions to the future. He wore a neat Vandyke and a gray four-button suit, favored silk cravats, and always wore a monocle when he visited Boston’s mansions.

Of course, at Boston’s mansions, he always went to the back door, because this fine figure of a man was a peddler. He sold the latest buttonhooks and cheese graters and carried an ample supply of basics like sewing thread and gas mantles, too. On Cape Cod, his visit had been the highlight of a woman’s week. In Boston, sales were tougher, but tougher sales made tougher salesmen, and he said that with a new century gallivanting toward them, those who could
sell
, not those who could cut the eyes from scallops, would thrive.

He always came to Thanksgiving with a bottle of French wine from S. S. Pierce on Tremont Street… and an idea. It took him most of the meal to get around to his latest idea. Long after they had all given thanks and wondered about their ancestors, Tom mentioned
progress
. Elwood jumped right in.

“It’s a good thing, progress. If you’ve seen the world, like I have, you agree. And I don’t say that to be a braggadoccio.” Along with his Edwardian wardrobe, Elwood favored inflated words and foreign phrases.

“I like the progress from one season to the next,” said Zachary. “It suited the ancestors we honor today. It’ll suit our children.”

Elwood turned to Ruthie, perhaps in the knowledge that the aged were the best allies of youthful enthusiasm. “What would you say, Auntie, to a hotel on Nauseiput Creek?”

“A-a-a-”

“
Hotel?
” shouted Zachary. “On my island?”

“
Our
island.” Elwood blew on his Indian pudding. “Yours, mine, and Aunt Ruthie’s.”

“And the Bigelows’, too,” added Tom.

“A ho-ho-ho-”

“They live on the other side. It’s none of their business.”

“They can damn quick
make
it their business.” Zachary pushed his son’s fingers away from the Indian pudding.

Tom slipped out the sketch pad and began to draw the face of Elwood P. Hilyard. He liked the way the enthusiasm brightened Elwood’s eyes. Enthusiasm was something most Cape Codders kept to a minimum. Elwood fairly dripped with it. He had been to the city.

Tom asked, “Why a hotel?”

“Why not? They’ve built them in Hyannis, in Dennis. Lorenzo Dow Baker put up a veritable Tajma Hall in Wellfleet.”

“Where do you plan to build this?” asked Tom.

“Where Pa’s house is now.”

Zachary grew very still. “That’s
my
house.”

“It’s the best spot, Zach, and you’ll have a market for what you grow and catch. And your little ones will get to know quality people.”

“Hote-hote-hote-hot
el
?” shouted Ruth.

“Yes, Ruth.”

“I like it.”

She liked it enough to change her will. When she passed away in 1890, she bequeathed the Hilyard property on Billingsgate to her nephew Tom so that he could paint in solitude, her Jack’s Island property to Elwood, her hair wreaths and $229.97 in savings to Zachary.

“This bequest may disappoint Zachary,” the will stated, “as he shall own only one-fourth of the Hilyard parcel. But if he will transfer to Elwood his one-fourth and allow the hotel to be built upon it, he shall receive
all
of my personal property and Elwood’s bequest. I believe this life is nothing unless we make things to leave behind. This agreement needs only the assent of Zachary to become binding.” With some reluctance, Zachary assented.

“Hotel? On Jack’s Island?” Heman Bigelow’s voice echoed off the oak tellers’ windows of his bank. Shipmasters’ widows and frugal scallop fishermen stopped in the middle of their transactions.

Elwood P. Hilyard put his monocle into his eye and lowered his voice. “That’s not the tonality I was hoping to hear from the president of the First Comers Cooperative.”

“I moved to Jack’s Island for peace and quiet… and good gunnin’. Not many places where a man can roll out of bed and into the duck blind.”

“This could be a fine place to put Cape Cod money.”

“I’ve done more than anyone to keep Cape Cod money workin’ since the Civil War, sonny. I need no lectures on how to use what these fine people have put in my trust”—he pointed an arthritic old finger at the faces of his customers beyond the gate—“and I didn’t move to Jack’s Island to see a hotel scare off all the ducks!”