Citizen Tom Paine (8 page)

“I knew ye'd come back,” she said smugly.

“Yes, I had to.”

“Then mind you behave.”

“I want to marry you,” he said desperately.

“Coo!”

“I love you, I'll do anything for you, I'll make you happy—”

“Go on.” But she was weakening; this was better than the footman, who had never proposed marriage, better than the butcher's way, better than her master who would catch her in the pantry; for a moment the twisted, burning eyes of the staymaker captured and held her, and in her small, fluttering mind she formed one glimpse of half-born dreams. She smiled and dropped a curtsey, and Tom Paine's soul reeled with gorgeous triumph.

“Kiss me, go on,” she said.

He held her in his arms and the world was his.

“And mind, no nonsense about being in service.”

“No, no, you're the whole world for me! Do I care what you've been. You'll be Tom Paine's wife now and I'll put you high as a duchess—higher!”

“Go on.”

“I'll be rich. I won't always be a staymaker!”

“High and mighty for you— Eee, you're a strange one.”

“You care a little,” he begged her.

“Mind you, marriage.”

“Yes, yes, my love, my darling.”

“You are a chap for words,” she said admiringly.

“They don't mean much; they're cheap. We'll have more, we'll have children.”

“Mouths to feed. Things come high,” she pointed out, making a face.

“If only you love me—”

“Maybe,” she pouted.

He thought afterward that if certain things had not been, if certain things had gone otherwise, it might have been different. What she was, she couldn't help, and knowing that only made it worse for him. Long after, he would think of how he had tried to teach her to read and write, and how after ten or fifteen minutes of struggling with an idea, she would turn on him with childish fury. Sometimes he was sure she hated him, and sometimes, holding her in his arms, he would have a brief moment in which he knew she loved him. She was what she was, beaten into shape by her tiny world, a tribal creature laid over and over with a thousand taboos. Sometimes, probing as gently as he could, uncovering layer after layer, he would be at the point of finding her frightened little soul, and she would burst out at him, “Coo! High and mighty and fine you are, making fun of me again, you with your fine airs!”

“I have no airs, Mary darling.”

“Acting like a duke, and you a corsetmaker.”

He would shrug and nod and tell her that he was sorry.

“Scornful of service you are, and I was that comfortable there, with gentlefolk too, not your dirty pigpen quality!” Or if she really became enraged, she would tell him details concerning the footman, her master, others, pouring it on to see him squirm and twist.

Nothing went right with his business. Staymaking was a long-term trade, and unless you had quality on your list you could just as well give up. There was not enough business in Sandwich to support two staymakers, and when Paine could no longer pay his rent, when he was down to his last crown piece, he went back to Greeg.

“You be na a steady un,” Greeg said stolidly, and that was the end of it.

They were given their eviction notice, and Paine said, “We'll try another town.”

“And I was to be higher than a duchess,” she mimicked him.

“Things go up and down,” Paine said quietly. “I'm not beaten.” But for the first time in his life he felt old, he at twenty-two, longing for a childhood he had never known, caught in the cage and racing round and round, like a squirrel on a treadmill. This time he expected her to go back into service, but she stuck with him, berating herself for it, giving him worse, yet caught by the glimpse of a dream she once had known, hating him for his ugliness, for his gangling insufficiency, for his hopelessness as a man of any practical affairs, but at the same time in awe of him.

The other town was no better, and then it was a third, the two of them trudging along the dusty highroad, Paine with his tools on his back, Mary with everything else they owned tied together in a kerchief. For Paine there was only a deep and abiding sense of guilt, and if Mary screamed at him, “It's your fault, your fault, I was that comfortable and that well,” he could only nod his head. “Not even able to keep a roof over my head!” Yes, that was true. “Fine ideas, fine ideas, fine ideas! Looking down your big nose at me in service! Going to change the world, you are, coo, Master Tom Paine—ye dirty, lazy lout!”

They would lie behind a hedge at night, with the cool mist of evening settling on them, with all the sweet, late smells of the English countryside riding the dark winds, and if it was quite cool she would move close to him, and for a brief time there would be peace. He could hold her and say to himself, I am in my castle, my home, and she would be sleepy enough to give in and hold her tongue. His love was so fierce and desperate, challenging God—you gave me this, she's mine and beautiful and lovely, and I can make her into what I desire, that every movement of hers, every whimper, every twitch of fright struck a deep chord of pain in him. He didn't blame her, but only himself; something deep and terrible inside of him gave him the power to look at the world and know, to see justice and injustice, and feel in his own soul the whip laid on the backs of millions. He was twenty-two and he was old, and what wasn't broken inside of him was being forged into a hard core of steel; but she was just a child, and at night when she was asleep, he would croon softly over her, “My baby, my little one, my darling.”

He stole that they might eat, and that gave her a stronger club to hold over his head, so that in her fury she would scream, “I'll give you to the sheriff, ye dirty poacher!” The penalty was death. He crept into a barn and took a sack of turnips. The penalty was to be drawn apart by two teams of horses. He killed a rabbit, and for that the penalty was to have his ears and nose removed. But he would have murdered, killed in cold blood, his bitterness was such a growing, grinding thing; only toward her did he display any sweetness and mercy.

In Margate, where they finally arrived, footsore and weary, he talked his way into the lease of a shop. Mary was pregnant, and Paine's desperation became almost a form of madness. All day he toiled over his bench, and at night hired himself out for whatever work there was. She was ailing so that the bitterness went out of her, and she whimpered and fretted like a hurt child. He didn't eat, and one by one sold his precious tools to give her cream and fowl and now and then a piece of beefsteak with pudding; half starved, he could think of only one thing, to keep a roof over her head, a fire in the grate, and a little food in the pot. His trade, what there was of it, barely paid the rent, and his efforts to obtain other necessities became a sort of frenzy. He remembered Gin Row, put a patch over one eye, bound and twisted a limb, and begged through the streets. He was sure a leech could help his wife, and finally, with many threats and coaxings, got one to come to the shop for a shilling.

“Festering fever,” the leech said, while Mary looked at him, wide-eyed and frightened.

“What can you do?” Paine asked him, afterward and away from the bed.

“One performs and expects a certain amount of bloodletting,” the doctor remarked. “Docendo discimus of the evil vapors, the spirits that distend her veins. Haud longis intervallis the blood must flow—”

Paine shook his head wearily. “I don't have Latin.”

“Ah, but medical terms, medical trade, medical mystery. Keep doors and windows close locked. When sickness comes, the devils dance like noxies.…”

That night she said, “Tommy, Tommy, I'm going for to die—”

“No, no, the doctor said you would be all right.”

All her spleen was gone, and she held onto his hand as if it was the last real thing on earth. And that night, white and wax-like from all the bleeding, she closed her eyes and turned her face away from Paine.

He sat all the next day, wide-eyed, silent, while the curious thronged the house, while the neighbors who had never taken any notice of them, poured in and out. He had no grief now, only a blazing anger that would burn within him forever.

West of the town of Philadelphia lay a green and rolling meadow called the Commons, and there Tom Paine made his way to watch the militia drill. He had thought of a mob before coming to the meadow on this placid, sunny spring afternoon, but this he saw was no mob. Neither was it an army, even in promise; neither was it anything the world had ever seen before, this group of men and boys, apprentices, journeymen, masters, clerks and students, smiths and millers, carpenters, weavers, barbers, printers, potters, men in aprons with the stain of their trade on their hands. These were the citizens of Philadelphia, yet not all the citizenry. The distinction eluded him, though it was there. Not that they were workingmen all, for there were masters and rich men as well as those who worked for hire; there was one banker, two mercers, a journalist, Tom Jaffers, who was rich enough to do nothing at all, three pastors, a grain speculator, and a fur buyer, to add to those who worked with their hands. There were Quakers, who were pacifists, Methodists, Puritans, Baptists, Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Jews, Congregationalists, Dissenters, Diests, Agnostics, and Atheists. There were free blacks along with the whites, Negro slaves along with their masters.

What moved them? Paine wondered. What distinguished them? What had brought them together?

Slowly, he walked around the field, his heart racing with excitement, apprehension, fear too, withal a hopefulness he had never known before. He watched them drill with their own weapons, this awkward, stumbling, self-conscious first citizen army the world had ever known; firelocks they bore, great old muskets, bell-mouthed matchlocks that had come into the country more than a century ago, a few long, graceful rifles from the back counties, halberds, axes, pikes, cutlasses, rapiers, two-handed museum-piece swords, and those who had no weapon, not even a horse pistol, just sticks which they carried with dead seriousness. Some of them, those who had a shilling to spend strutting, already had uniforms, fantastically colored outfits with mighty cartridge boxes upon which was painted either “Liberty,” or “Freedom,” or “Death to Tyrants,” or some other slogan calculated to impress the world with their state of mind. Officers they had too, fat old Fritz van Goort for a colonel, little Jimmy Gains-way a captain, Captain Jacob Rust, the miller, and that only the beginning, for the officers' list was near a mile long, with all of them shouting orders at once with no attempt at synchronization, left face, about face, forward march, halt, forward march, men poking into each other, being bowled over, stumbling, tripping, whole lines of men going over like tenpins, shouting, a musket firing by accident—of course, they all had them loaded, with shot, too.

Paine continued on his rounds, and there he was not alone, for a good half of the city had turned out to watch the militia in its first drill. The women stood in colorful clusters, umbrellas open to keep off the sun, the children ran back and forth screaming, and the old gaffers smoked their pipes and asked what the world was coming to. And the militiamen who saw their wives, sweethearts, or sisters, stopped their drill to wave or whistle. Sir Arnold Fitzhugh was the center of the Tory crowd, polite sneers and many silver snuff-boxes, and now and then a guffaw when the citizen soldiers did a particularly stupid thing. And when Paine approached them, Fitzhugh called merrily, “Well, scrivener, what do you think of our rebels?”

“I haven't been able to think yet.”

“Blast me, hear that, he hasn't been able to think yet.”

Pastor Blane, the Quaker, said, “I see thee are not with them, Tom.”

“No—”

“Scruples.”

“Doubts, I think,” Paine answered slowly, thinking that if he went ahead now, there would be no turning back, ever.

“Thee see what has happened to their scruples,” the pastor said, half sadly, half bitterly. “Eighteen of my flock in there. The Lord said, thou shalt not kill, but a Roman holiday is not to be turned aside from that easily, and now they are marching with sticks, as if the one worthy possession for a man were a gun.”

“The strangest part of America,” Paine said softly, “is that men have guns. When they shoot them off—”

“I don't follow thee?”

“I don't follow myself,” Paine shrugged.

Jacob Rust came to the print shop and said, “I want you in my company, Thomas, my boy.” He was a little fat man with a great booming voice.

“Yes?”

“A damned fine little force we're going to have.”

“I'll think about it,” Paine nodded.

“Is it something to think about?”

“Yes. There's a devil of a lot to think about these days.”

“Now look, Master Thomas, you're over from England these few months. People are going to ask, is he England or is he Pennsylvania? Does he smell sweet or does he stink?”

“I don't mind my smell,” Paine grinned.

“But we do!”

“I don't go the way the wind blows,” Paine said evenly.

“I know what I have to do, or I am beginning to. I wonder whether you do, Rust? I wonder whether you know what all this is?”

“It's standing up for our rights as free Englishmen, by God!”

“Is it?”

“And we mean to fight for them!”

Paine shrugged and turned away.

And for some, nothing at all had changed. Paine went to a ball given by the Fairviews, wealthy importers of Tory leanings. They had him because he represented the Pennsylvania Magazine; Paine went because he had to have answers, many answers and coming from all sides, answers to his doubts, his longings, his prayers, his hatreds. Four pounds bought a coat of fine, brown broadcloth, a better garment than any he had ever put on his back. He wore a ruffle at his throat, a new white wig, and good leather breeches, a gentleman right enough with a stick and a three-cornered hat, invited to the best, stepping into quality on his own, into a hall lit by four hundred candles, where a Negro slave called melodiously, “Mister Thomas Paine!”