Citizen Tom Paine (11 page)

But being with Sarah was compounded of peace and rest-fulness, and a content such as he had not known before. Indolence was something very new to him; unemployment he knew and starvation he knew, just as he knew poverty and drunkenness and squalor and all the shambling wrecks who did nothing because there was nothing for them to do. But the pleasure of sheer laziness, the sweet satisfaction of dawdling in a Pennsylvania summertime was as strange for him as was this curious family in their stone house with its foot-thick walls.

He would sit in the barnyard and watch the girl, or else in the kitchen where he told endless stories both to the children and Hester Rumpel. He found in himself a gift for a mild sort of fun-making; he found he could say things that would make them laugh. And as often as he could, he would help Sarah. That was difficult, for her own strength was a very matter-of-fact thing, while few people realized the layers of broad peasant muscle in Tom Paine's sloping shoulders. But in carrying buckets of water or sacks of feed, he was permitted to have his own way now and again, and it gave him a strange pleasure when his strength dragged from her a grudging smile of admiration.

She spoke little, as if taking it for granted that he knew how much she could convey with a smile and a word, or simply with a movement of her fair head. When Paine confided to her the work he was doing, he half doubted whether she understood more than a part of it.

“I'm writing a small book to make things clear,” he said once.

“You mean the Boston men?”

“That and yourself.”

She smiled and nodded and didn't ask him what he meant by that.

“It's like having lived for one thing,” he tried to explain. “This book is the one thing. I want it to sweep everything out of the way, so men and women can start fresh.”

“Father will enjoy reading it,” she said.

There were never any words of love, he never kissed her. If he stayed of an evening after the children were put to bed, they might walk down the lane while Jacob smoked his pipe on the porch. There was a moon, waxing and waning through the nights; there were the birds courting in the darkness and competing with the crickets; there was the far-off barking of dogs. Yet it was no surprise to him when she said, on one of those evenings, “Will you be asking for my hand, Tom?” And then added, as if he had asked a question, “Mother says there's a mighty difference of age, but I don't hold with that. I've a great favor for you, Tom, and I think I love you with all my heart.”

She was simple, he decided, simple and no more, but the rush of pain in his heart, searing, hopeless pain told him that never in his life had he wanted anything more than this fair-haired girl. Whether he loved her or not was suddenly unimportant; she was his first and last good hope; she was all that makes a man human, and after this he would not be human; after this he would walk silently and alone.

They went on a while further and then sat down on a stone fence, and he told her, “I was married twice before.”

She looked at him without reproach, and he told her who his first wife was and how she had died.

“That was a sorrowful thing,” she said, still without reproach, but he knew it was over and done with, that Sarah was alive again, freed from this strange, hook-nosed wanderer. He should have gone then, but he wanted to tell her; he wanted to justify himself where no justification was needed. He tried to make her understand how a man might be broken and go to shelter as an animal goes to ground; but in her way of life and thinking there was a dignity that could not be broken but only destroyed. The story came out haltingly; it was nine years after his first wife had died, and he was at the bottom; but what did she know of the bottom with her health and her bountiful vitality? He tried to tell her of the things he had done in those nine years, of the hell that was London for the poor, of his pent-up savage desire to be free, of the trades he had followed, the degradation, the misery, the brief surges of hope when he preached in the meadows with the Methodists—“Cast off sin and come ye into the arms of the Lord”—and then the hope gone, the bottom rungs of the ladder, and then finally the very bottom, the deepest bottom, the complete hopelessness where there was nothing but death.

“And then this man took me in,” he said. “He was a good man. He kept a little tobacco shop and he had almost nothing at all, but he took me in. Like Christ, he knew not the evil from the good, but only the weak from the strong. God help me, I was weak, I was dying.”

“But what was his life worth?” she might have thought from that brief picture of inferno.

“I had a debt to him?” he asked her.

“Yes.”

“Then he died. He had a wife and daughter. I wanted to care for them, I stayed with them. And then there was talk, and for the mother's sake I married the girl whom I didn't love—”

She could see that.

He tried to tell how the business had broken up, it was such a poor little trade, the way his wife began to hate, how he tried to help others, to work some good. His words were no use any more. He couldn't tell how his wife despised him, how she left him, his dread of the debtors' prison, how he fled. He didn't want to make himself out to be anything, but the more he tore off in abasement, the less Sarah comprehended. This half-world, this dreadful twilight land of hopelessness, was as far away and as unreal to her as the sandy wastes of Egypt. For her, human beings were compounded flesh and blood, not pain and terror and wretchedness.

When he said goodnight, he knew he would never come back, and as he walked away she looked after him, neither happy nor sorrowful, but thinking of how he wanted to write a small book to make things clear.

Things were quieter in Philadelphia. Members of the Second Continental Congress, after they had said all they possibly could say and accomplished practically nothing at all, remembered their farms and estates, their mills, shops, and distilleries, and by ones and twos they trickled away from Philadelphia. The new commander in chief, General George Washington of Virginia, started his leisurely ride northward to Boston to take command of the several thousand Yankees who now sprawled around that city in a sort of siege. The bloody battle which afterwards came to be known as Bunker Hill but was then called Breed's Hill, was still fresh enough in the minds of the British to make them move very cautiously, and as things were now both sides waited for the other to make the next move.

In Philadelphia, a hot, slow summer set in. Prudent shopkeepers, feeling that this was another storm blown on its way, took down the shutters from their shop windows; and as a whole, the citizens of the town were quite satisfied things had not come to a head.

Meanwhile, Paine stayed close to the city, lived with it, and felt its pulse. He never went back to the Rumpels after that last evening there, yet he took a certain grim pride in the fact that the incident had not set him back on his heels. Slowly and painfully, out of all the broken, dirty pieces of his life, he was building a plan, a course, and a method. Now he was content to walk alone; he quite knew what he wanted to do, and he felt an ominous certainty that as time passed it would become even more clear. In the life on the peaceful, prosperous farm he saw something good and peaceful and sweet, yet he was half grateful that it was denied to him.

He had a little room, a bed, a bolster, chest, coat-rack, and table, two fairly good suits of clothes, ink and paper. That was enough, a man should want no more. He needed a few pennies for candles, something for food, something for drink. During this time he no longer allowed himself to be drunk, yet he saw no reason to do without liquor. Rum helped him; caring little for himself or for what became of him, he was ready to use anything that might make his pen move more easily on the paper. He was writing stuff out of thought and making something out of nothing, and after he had worked steadily for five, six, or seven hours, the little room closed in on him. Rum helped; as he drank, his movements would become slow and painful, but the quill would continue to scratch, which was all that mattered. He had no delusions; what he wrote might never be read by more than a dozen persons, but it was all he could do and what he had to do. Men don't make new worlds in an afternoon; brick has to be placed on brick, and the process is long and incredibly painful.

Without realizing it, he neglected his appearance, sometimes spending twenty-four hours in his room, shaving less often, hoarding his small store of money, allowing his stockings to wear out and his clothes to become shabby. Those citizens of Philadelphia who noticed the change remarked that Aitken was wise to fire him. “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” they said. His money low, Paine spent a night writing a poem and took it to Aitken, who gave him a pound, certainly more than it was worth. But somewhere in his flint-like, Scotch shell, Aitken nursed a fondness for this plodding, almost bullish man, who childishly believed that the world wanted to hear his solution to its woes.

“How goes the masterpiece?” Aitken asked him.

“It's no masterpiece. It's an attempt at common sense, of which I have little enough, God knows.”

“I will no' print it, so don't come asking me.”

Paine grinned.

“Will ye have supper?”

“I will at that,” Paine nodded. He hadn't eaten a good cooked meal in God knows how long, and he felt a sudden longing to be with people he knew. At Aitken's table was Joshua Craige, a linen merchant recently come over from England, full of news of how London was taking the revolt. “There's more for the colonies than against them,” Craige said. “You would think the revolt is coming there, not here.”

“And perhaps it is,” Paine said thoughtfully.

“And how do you make that out, mister?”

Paine shrugged and avoided the question. Only vaguely defined in his mind was a picture of the whole world renewing itself, dreams of a brotherhood so vast, so complete that the half-drawn conception was overpowering and beyond words.

Jefferson would not call attention to Paine's poverty, his failings in matters of dress; Jefferson was in the process of adoring the common man, and being only thirty-two he was still young enough to attach reality to his conception. Himself the immaculate aristocrat, it astonished him—though it shouldn't have—to find that Paine arrived at much the same conclusions out of experience that he, Jefferson, had gathered out of philosophy and reading. But whereas Jefferson had dreamed enough democracy to make it real, he could never quite grasp the concept of revolution. For Paine it was the other way around, and his thoughts and ideas were closer to those of the average working man than Jefferson's ever could be. Listening to Paine read something of what he had written, Jefferson wondered whether Paine knew what devils he was loosing upon the quiet eighteenth-century world wherein they lived.

Paine read hoarsely and self-consciously, ashamed before Jefferson:

“The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. 'Tis not the affair of a City, a County, a Province or a Kingdom; but of a continent—at least one-eighth part of the habitable globe. 'Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time, by the proceedings now. Now is the seed-time of Continental union, faith and honor. The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound would enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full grown characters.…”

There was no style; it came forth as raucously as the preaching of a Methodist minister, and it struck with frantic hammer blows. A man could memorize words like those and drive his plow or hammer to the rhythm—

“O! Ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the Globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”

Jefferson didn't smile; a working man who cribbed from the Bible all he knew of style, who in the terms of a backwoods preacher roared a new creed for mankind, nevertheless said something no one else dared to say outright.

“What are you going to call it?” Jefferson asked.

“I think, common sense. That's all it is.”

Word of Paine's project got around, and people would say, “That's common sense.” They would say, “He is preaching dissolution and hatred and revolt. Separation from the mother country.” Or, “Another common sense,” when someone spoke a word for the independence of the thirteen colonies.

A little book to show men what to think.

“Of course, separation in time,” old Ben Franklin said to him one day. “But be careful, Paine, be careful.”

He carried the manuscript around with him, crumpled, ink-stained paper, and sitting in a tavern with a mug of rum, he would write, correct, write again, smudge and blot and scrape together the future of America.

“Is it still common sense?” he'd be asked.

He wove the Bible into what he was writing. To the devil with the sophisticates of the city, he told himself. The man with the plow is the man with the gun, and the man with the plow reads and believes only one book. So he took from the Bible whatever he could whenever he could, and wove it into the rest. One night in a coffee house, having had a little too much, he read aloud. Of course, it was common sense, and he could draw a crowd, and it was very well put that the devil can quote scripture.

“To hell with all of you and all of you be damned!” he roared at the well-dressed, well-paunched Philadelphia merchants. And then, going home that night, he was set upon by half a dozen young toughs, his manuscript torn to shreds, himself rolled in the mud and beaten, his pants removed and a lash laid twenty or thirty times over his behind.