Citizen Tom Paine (4 page)

“A bad one, and take the rod to him before he does murder,” the Squire told Paine's father.

Tom said, “He's a fat swine.” There was truth in that; two hundred and thirty-five pounds, the Squire was a prime and ruddy English gentleman, hounds in the morning, roast beef and port for dinner, hounds in the afternoon, roast beef and port for supper, hunting talk and whisky until midnight —“By Gawd, he's a fair fine gentleman, God bless him,” his tenants said. He was all that, and it was a wonder he put up with the devilishness of the staymaker's son.

The Squire had his own son in Eton, a tall, strong, handsome young man of fifteen, a pleasure to look at, and so well set out that there wasn't a villager but was delighted to pull a forelock and give young master Harry Good Morning. Young Harry, during his last term at school, had lost eight hundred pounds at cards, and the Squire, hearing about it. slapped his knee and roared with laughter: “Damned young devil! Damned young devil!”

Home from school with three other young bloods, Harry found country life boring. Necessity spurred him to a certain degree of inventiveness, and he and his friends decided to do a bit of lessoning on Tom Paine. However, they preserved an air of legitimacy, waiting for him to trespass, a circumstance not at all rare considering the amount of land the Squire owned. They caught the boy, beat him insensible with birch rods, and then hanged him by his foot from an oak tree. They cut him down only when it seemed that he was dead, and then, slightly disappointed to find him still breathing, they stripped him naked and rolled him in a bog. They gave him some whisky to revive him, and then whipped him home naked. Altogether, it was such a game go as they hadn't even dared to hope for that summer, and it would provide them with an endless stream of conversation at school the following year. The Squire himself told and retold the tale, and whenever he related it went into such paroxysms that his wife feared he would have a stroke.

At his bench, fastening stays under his father's eye, Tom said quietly, “Thee were a staymaker, and I—and if thee were a beggar, that way I, and if thee were a thief, that way I, kneel down to the Squire, live in poverty and dirt, jump from the path when the hounds come running, pull a forelock when the lady comes, go to church and pray to God—”

“Shut thee!” his father roared.

“I'm a man!” the boy cried hoarsely. “I tell thee, I'm a man, a man, a man!”

“Shut thee!” his father yelled. “Shut thee, or I'll break thee sinful head!”

“You are a staymaker, and I am a staymaker,” the boy sobbed.

“Thee! Thee, thee sinful devil! With the brain of Gentiles and the speech of Gentiles, God help thee!”

The devil was in him, roaring, buzzing in his ears, prodding him on. A month later, he ran off to sea, shipping aboard a privateer as a cabin boy. The captain, grinning, said to him, “What do I want with a Quaker?”

“Take me, try me.”

“Will you fight?”

“I'll fight,” Tom said eagerly. “I'll fight, I swear I'll fight.” Here was a vision of freedom broad and dazzling; on the sea, a man was his own master; riches meant freedom, and there were no heights to which a man might not rise. The captain caught him across the ear and flung him full length on the deck.

“Come along, little one, come along,” he smiled.

The captain was drunk constantly and a beast about it; the mate was drunk only half the time and only half a beast about it; but both of them took it out on the cabin boy, and by the time they had coasted around and into the Thames, Tom Paine was a livid mass of bruises. There was only one relief, and that was to get at the captain's rum and swill it down. And for that, the beatings were doubled. Anchored outside of London, the boy slipped over the side and swam to shore. For the next two weeks he lived in the hut of a half-witted garbage collector, and in that time he ate what he could pick out of the buckets.

They had warned him in Thetford that London was a sinful city, but as he wandered wide-eyed among the sewer-like streets, he began to understand the difference between those who sin and those whose life is a sin. The lower-class Londoner of that time, the beast whose forest was a maze of alleyways, lived on cheap gin, cheap sin, and cheap robbery. For the first, the punishment was slow death, for the second horrible death, and for the last death by hanging or stoning or quartering. For a tupenny piece a man could get roaring, crazy drunk, and since drunkenness was the only way for the poor to forget that hell was now and not in the hereafter, gin had during the course of years come to replace almost every other food. Three-year-olds drank gin by the glassful, nursing mothers lived on gin and quieted their babies with it, working men took for their supper a can of gin, old folks hastened death with it, and adolescents made themselves insane with it. In some streets, at certain times of the day, the whole population would be screaming drunk with gin. Prostitutes lost their livelihood when any female from a child to a mother would sell herself for a penny to grind in the gin-mill.

In this, Tom Paine lived and drank and ran like a rat, and stole and cursed and fought, and slept in alleys and sheds and slimy basements. Until one day he took hold of himself, left Gin Row, and apprenticed himself to a staymaker.

There was no hope, he knew, no escape, no salvation.

Sixteen, a staymaker's assistant, he hadn't touched gin in over a year. His clothes were clean, if not good, and he read books. Night after night, he read books, all the books he could lay hands on—Swift and Addison and Pope and Defoe and Congreve and Fielding and Richardson, even Spenser, and sometimes Shakespeare; most of what he read he did not understand; Defoe and Fielding were somewhat plain to him, yet he rather resented that they should write of what he knew so well, instead of the dream world he fancied in print. He was a man, making his own way; it took him only a little while to completely expunge the Quaker “thee” from his speech. He swaggered through London, and with a rosy haze before his eyes, he would stand for hours before White's, the great Tory gambling house, or Brooks's, the Whig equivalent, and watch the bloods come to lay their thousands and their tens of thousands on the turn of a card. “That for me,” he would say to himself, “that for me, by God!”

He made two friends, Alec Stivvens, a draper's assistant, a thin, tubercular boy of fifteen, and Johnny Coot, apprentice chimney sweep, twenty-two, but with the body of a twelve-year-old. The three of them would go to a tavern and drink bitters until their heads felt like mighty lumps of lead, and then hanging onto each other, they would go reeling home, singing at the top of their lungs. These drinking bouts meant beatings for two of the apprentices, but for Tom there was always the intercession of Mistress Morris, his master's wife.

It had started the time Master Morris, a wasted little man of sixty, went off to Nottingham on a matter of business. His wife, twenty years younger, plump, pretty, considering that smallpox had marked her whole face, called Tom in to fix a split corset.

She said to Tom afterwards, “You're a sly devil, the way of you Quakers. But don't you go to talk on me or I'll put a knife in your back.” Still she couldn't harm a flea, and it made him feel like a man afterwards, boasting to Stivvens and Coot. She was good to him, and she brought him cakes and cookies and kept impressing Morris with what a fine boy Tom was. But Stivvens, inflamed by Paine's stories, tried the same thing on his mistress; a rolling pin put an inch-high lump on his head.

Stivvens wanted to be a highwayman; he talked of almost nothing else, and he said a hundred times if he said it once that as soon as he was sixteen he would go off and join Red Gallant's band on the Dover Road. That was in the time when highwaymen still wielded great power, when bands of forty and fifty cutthroats roamed over the King's Roads and fought pitched battles with the redcoat troops.

“'E's a prince, that Red Gallant is,” Stivvens would say.

“Fair enough, but it's a short life. Me to live to ninety,” Coot remarked cautiously.

Tom said there was only one way of life, and that among the bloods. If you weren't blood in England, you were dirt. He was minding the bloods and watching their ways.

“Be one yerself, eh?”

“Maybe,” Tom said.

“And 'ow?”

“There are ways. I ain't saying it comes easy, but there are ways.”

Stiwens was impressed. “You got a way, Tom?” he inquired.

“Ah—”

“Lum!” Coot snorted. “Out a dirt ye come; dirt breeds dirt! Don't I know? Down it's easy, but no goin' up.”

“I ain't saying,” Tom nodded.

“Lum!”

But Stivvens afterwards told Tom that he had faith; a man didn't have a head on his shoulders for nothing, and he himself was making for a take, a small take, nothing impressive, but as Stivvens put it, “Enough shillings for an evening full a noxies. Pretty ones too. Four shillings a poke, I intends to pay.”

Tom saw the intent and warned the boy, “They can hang you for stealing.”

“If they catch me.”

Tom dreamed that night, slept fitfully, had nightmares, woke and slept, and the next day begged Stivvens, “Don't do it, Alec, don't.”

They caught Stivvens; he had broken into the till of a weaver next door, to his master's shop and made off with two pounds eight. Like a fool, he put the money into his shoes, and while he overslept in the morning, his master took the shoes to cobble, thinking he would take the cost out of the boy's pay. The weaver came in to tell his tale, and the sum of the money fitted in too nicely. They beat the boy, and it took only thirty of the best to make him confess.

For the next few weeks, Coot talked of nothing else but Stivvens in Old Bailey. “Fancy,” he would say to Tom, “little Stivvens.”

“It don't seem possible,” Tom agreed.

“They'll try him with the great ones,” Stivvens decided.

“Hanging?”

“Don't see what else.”

“They can't hang him, he's a baby, a little fool. He never had sense. His wits were addled.”

“Lum, open and shut. 'E broke in, now it's a rope around 'is neck. Open and shut.”

Open and shut it was. Tom and Coot managed to see him once after the judge had done the sentencing. It was the first time Tom had been in jail, but Coot was an old hand at such things, having been in debtors' prison twice, and it was he who suggested that they bring along a loaf of bread and a bottle of gin. They each brought a quart, and Coot assured Tom it was a handy thing to make the rope stretch easy. At the jail, Stivvens couldn't say a word, but just sat and stared and stared, the tears making little designs on his dirty cheeks.

“A tight lip,” Coot said. “You're in with the great ones now—on the same scaffold as Johnny Hasbrook of Watling Street was stretched, all the time laughing. By God, 'e was a great un, murderous mean an' having twice the men as Red Gallant ever did.”

But there wasn't a sparkle from Stivvens, only the tears running down his emaciated cheeks.

“Save the gin and drink it tomorrow,” Tom forced himself to say.

“Save it, save it,” Coot agreed. “Lum, get heated, and you won't feel the rope, but by God you'll spit in the hangman's eye.”

They both went to the procession the following day, their masters giving them the afternoon off; and they would have gone, even if they hadn't known Stivvens, for when there was a great hanging procession, starting out at Newgate, and proceeding in such a magnificent manner two miles to Tyburn, all of London took a holiday. All along the two-mile line of the march, the mob made a sea of human faces, a raggle taggle that swayed and shifted and screamed and cursed and hooted and shouted and whistled and shrieked, men, women and children, old gaffers, babies, almost everyone with bread and cheese and pickles, wine for the sturdy tradesman or journeyman, gin and bitters for the working folk, pickpockets, ruffians, sluts, noblemen, scholars, and in carriages and chairs the great gentlemen and ladies of the land. For when a human being went to die, it was drama, high and glorious, such as the stage or the bedroom could never provide; and what did it matter so near to the gates of heaven or hell whether the condemned person was highborn or low-born?

Coot groaned and whimpered at his lack of size; he charged the crowd, worming his way through like an eel; he was indefatigable, and he wore Tom out. And once he got through and caught a glimpse of Stivvens, swaying in the cart, his peaked little face hardly able to comprehend that he himself was the author of this glorious fete, the cart would pass on, and the plunging and squirming would have to start over again.

“It ain't no way to treat his friends,” Coot complained. “It ain't no way.”

For an hour the chimney sweep and the staymaker's apprentice battled their way along the line to the gallows, and during that hour Tom Paine noticed a change come over Stivvens. Either the gin was taking effect, or else the glory of the occasion had driven the fear from his heart. Stivvens was posturing and bowing and posing; he even did a little dance in the cart; he waved his hands; he grimaced like a little ape.

“'Igh and mighty, 'e is,” Coot crowed. “'Igh and mighty.”

And the crowd cheered him. Not even Johnny Hasbrook of Watling Street had gone to his death in that fashion.

And even on the scaffold Stivvens stood and smiled foolishly.

That night, Paine left Morris; he ran away; he beat his head blindly against the walls of the cage; he wandered for two days in the streets of London, and then he fed himself into the gin mill. He holed up in a haunt of beggars and thieves and heard things that are not good for human ears; but he was not human, and the beggars and thieves were not human.

For two months he dragged himself through hell, and then, because part of his stubbornness was a will to live, he apprenticed himself to a cobbler. He was able to hold onto the simple belief that it was better to make shoes than stays.