Cape Cod (27 page)
ii.
Rake Hilyard sat at his dining room table. He had his telephone, his typewriter, his scratch pad, and all the papers and articles he had collected over the years… on just about everything that had interested him.
He called it his office. His niece Emily called it a firetrap. Rake guessed she said that so that some night her husband could burn the place down.
It was ten-thirty in the morning, and he had already made forty phone calls to remind people about the town meeting. His ear felt like a piece of pounded veal. But if the taxpayers would take the island, the Bigelows could be stopped from ripping it to pieces.
He took his breakfast plate out to the kitchen and threw it into the sink. Egg yolk had dried on his fork and his chin. He had lived to be ninety and ate an egg every day, damn the doctors. He smoked, too, damn them all.
Helluva thing that a man had to petition a town meeting because he couldn’t trust his own family. But there it was. Even Geoff and his Bigelow wife wanted to develop the island.
And a helluva thing how it all seemed to start at once, noises about Bigelow trouble with the banks, then the talk that it was time to develop the gem of Bigelow properties, Jack’s Island, then the appearance of the 1904 subdivision that might allow the development to proceed whether the town objected or not, then the visit from that Carolyn Hallissey. More than funny.
He slipped the list from his pocket. After Carolyn Hallissey’s visit, he had written down everything he had ever heard or wondered about the log. He thought that if he looked at the black and white for long enough, like a scientist studying results, he’d be sure to see connections.
While he reheated a cup of coffee in a saucepan, he thought of a good hiding place for the list. He should protect it, because it might be the treasure map for millions of dollars. And there was something in that log that had scared Dickerson Bigelow’s grandfather to death in 1911. Rake remembered. It had to do with the painting Carolyn Hallissey had bought a few days before.
He wrote
“Murder on the Mayflower
by Tom Hilyard” at the bottom of the list. Then he heard a sound.
Out front? Now on the side. Now in the back.
He had been waiting for this. He had suspected for some time that somebody was watching him.
Hide the list
. He went up the stairs to the picture on the landing. That would be a good place. Right there, inside the backing. Then he went up the rest of the way to the bedroom and grabbed what he called his security blanket, a pump-action shotgun.
He wasn’t surprised that they—whoever
they
were—had finally decided to break in this morning. Rake had driven off at seven o’clock to have his car serviced. Then he had walked the two miles back with the Cape Cod
Times
and a quart of milk under his arm. Which meant there was no car in his driveway and the place looked deserted.
And the damn jogger, the one who’d been running by every day for the last two weeks, was snooping in the backyard. Cute disguise, that jogging suit. Let someone put on a pair of silk shorts and some astronaut shoes, and he looked as innocent as a kid hunting for a lost dog. Rake had been around long enough to know that nothing was innocent.
“Hello?” The jogger was at the back door now, calling into the house. He was about twenty-eight, blond, and bland enough to be some graduate student waiting on tables at night so that he could go to the beach during the day. A bead of sweat dripped off the tip of his nose.
And a shotgun pressed against the back of his neck.
Rake couldn’t tell if that was sweat or something else he saw running down the guy’s leg a moment later.
The jogger said he’d sprained his ankle and wanted to use the phone. Rake said he wasn’t born yesterday and told him to go use a Bigelow phone. The jogger limped off, muttering about a crazy old man. The limp sure looked real, but you couldn’t be too careful.
iii.
Geoff Hilyard sat beneath the skylight in his studio. He had resolved to work, but his mind kept wandering to the Brewster town meeting that night.
Rake and Clara were offering their land, provided that the town would acquire the rest of the island for conservation. Probable cost, six million. Nobody thought the article would pass. The Board of Selectmen opposed it. So did the Finance Committee. But Rake had gotten the signatures to put it on the warrant, so the meeting was called.
If the article passed, Geoff would be off the hook, and well paid for any land the town took. But he would lose the commission, the chance to do something big. But he loved the island. But the money and prestige from a big commission… It had been like that all morning, a leapfrogging game of contradictions playing inside his head.
He had an old topographical map of the island pinned to the wall above his drafting table, along with photographs he had taken of the high-peaked Aptucxet replica, the 1793 house where Rake lived, and the barn behind it.
He often found that sketching something old gave him new ideas. He used a 2b pencil on yellow trace. It felt familiar in his hand. And it felt good to be in his office, in the loft of the barn behind his Truro house, right beneath the skylight where he worked best. Janice was right. This was what he should be doing instead of treasure hunting.
He drew Rake’s house from several angles. Nothing came. He studied the deep slope of the Aptucxet roof. Did the first Jack’s Island house look like that, or was it the more conventional saltbox? And what of the barn? It was said that Quakers met there in the days of the persecutions. He drew it.
By the mere act of drawing, he was taking another step toward taking the job, toward wanting it.
“Traitor,” a voice whispered up behind him, and Geoff spun about with his 2b pencil like a knife in his hand.
George’s fleshy face was grinning at him.
“For a big guy, you move quiet.”
George slapped his belly. “I’m losin’ weight, remember. You start pushin’ forty, you have to toughen up. Otherwise, the young ones won’t look at you.”
“You ought to find someone to settle down with. It’s dangerous out there.”
“Tell me about it.” George looked over Geoff’s shoulder. “I brought my metal detector.”
“Metal detector? You’re kidding.”
“No. You’d be amazed at the conversations you can start. We could walk the beach, pretend we’re looking for the metal clasp of the
Mayflower
logbook. Maybe we could both make a friend. We’ll find you a girl.”
“I don’t need any more friends right now. And Jimmy’s right. The log’s just an old legend.” Geoff began to sketch the barn.
“Jimmy’s a tight-ass, in the figurative sense, of course. Ever since his tribe lost the Mashpee land suit, he’s gotten whiter and whiter and tighter and tighter, just buried his anger. He’s no fun anymore. Take it from one who knows. You can’t hide things.”
Geoff sketched in the roofline and drew the door. “So why am I a traitor?”
“You’re sketching elevations for that island. And you don’t want to do it.”
“But I’m an architect.” Geoff felt George boring in. He concentrated on the point of the pencil and sketched a door. “Did you know that Quakers used Jack’s Island for their worship at the beginning?”
“Now
there
was a group that let it all hang out.” George flopped onto the cracked old leather sofa that smelled like the barn. “They said what they thought, did what was right. I read a lot about them when I was younger… before I did what was right for me.”
“Before you came out?”
George shrugged. “History has metaphors for all of us. The Quakers were treated almost as badly as… well, as guys like me.”
Geoff drew a bay window on the side of the barn. He thought about the courage of the Quakers, the first faith to challenge the orthodoxy of the Pilgrims. Courage… gumption.
These words went together, like Ma Little’s conundrum: Who was more courageous? The changers, like Dickerson, or those who resisted change, like Rake?
“Like I said when you were wondering about moving down here”—George locked his hands behind his head and looked up at the ceiling, more like the patient than the doctor—“sometimes you just have to flip the bird to the whole world.”
“It’s not that simple when you have a family.”
“It will be if you find that log.”
“Or if I take the Bigelow deal.”
Inside the bay window, Geoff drew the heads of four Quakers. A family, doing what they thought was right…
October 1660
“What they do?”
“Sit.”
“What else?”
“Nothin’. Just sit, like loggerheads.”
Jack Hilyard and Autumnsquam peered through the oiled-paper windows at the people inside the barn.
They sat on benches arranged to form a square. Mostly they were silent, but from time to time, the spirit came upon one who declaimed from Scripture or gave personal witness or spewed criticism of the colony’s leaders.
Then Christopher Hilyard would ask, “Who doth not quake at the word of the Lord?”
And the Indian woman at his side would answer, “Only those who love him not.”
Those in the barn called this worship, but in the eyes of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, it was subversion.
“Bloody Quakers,” muttered Jack.
“More true faiths.”
“Bad enough they get me own son to join ’em. But now comin’ here to hold their foul meetin’. I’ve a mind to turn ’em out, I do. Chris and his squaw, the bloody lot of ’em.”
“He your son, she my niece, even if they both bloody Christians. No turn out.”
Jack kicked at the soil and stared out to sea. In the beginning, he had never looked out from this place without feeling the urge to pinch the back of his hand and assure himself he was not dreaming. But after five years, the island was his for certain, and he dreamed only of keeping it.
He had even given it the name in Jones’s journal. Jack’s Island it was called, and it showed Jack’s shaping hand.
A two-story post-and-beam house had risen in the middle of a clearing. Not far from the back door was the well sweep, though Jack rarely drank water. Beyond that lay a huge pile of firewood, for in this land of plenty, he would never be cold again. About twenty feet back of the house, he had built a barn over the root cellar he discovered that first winter. And where once a path had led through oak and beech to the water, an open field now rolled to the tryworks, where oil was rendered from whale blubber and smoke stained the sky like sin upon a clean soul.
As it was the Sabbath, the smoke was sin in truth as well as metaphor.
The trees behind the barn had fed the first trying fires, and tall hardwoods across the island had fallen to keep the fires burning, to keep the oil flowing, to give the people of Plymouth and Boston and London itself the essence of Cape Cod whale, distilled from godlike majesty to a clean, pure beam of light. In Jack’s eyes, such work was worthy of any Sabbath.
The colony disagreed. And it seemed that a delegation was coming to make their point. Or perhaps it was the presence of the Quakers that brought them, for nothing had so challenged the colony as this new form of devotion, not even the French.
In either event, a shallop was plowing down from the northwest, riding the incoming tide, and Jack cursed at the sight of it.
“Want put out try fires?” asked Autumnsquam.
“They seen the smoke. No sense actin’ afeared of ’em now.” He pounded on the door of the barn.
“Our service be not finished,” said Christopher from within.
Jack kicked at the door. “ ’Twill be when that Plymouth boat gets here.”
Those words were enough to swing open the barn door and summon forth the soldiers of a new religious rebellion. They neither hurried nor seemed troubled that Colonial officials were coming, perhaps to arrest them. They made their goodbyes with cheer and trooped off toward the inland path.
Jack watched them for a time—old Goody Privet, the Smiths and their five children from Eastham, the Stubbses and the Burkitts from Yarmouth—simple people whose lives had a simple center. If they failed to grow their crops, catch their fish, cut their firewood, they died. But when they sought to simplify their faith, they complicated their own lives and confused everyone else’s.
“Get thyself home and put on clothes of color,” he said to his son.
“Black be good enough.”
“It be a badge of defiance,” said Jack.
“And who hath been more defiant than thee?”
“I done it quiet. That’s why we got this island.”
“Quiet defiance, in some places, be called cowardice.”
“Stop.” Autumnsquam put himself between father and son. “Bad word for son to say to father.” He stamped his foot on the ground for emphasis. He was smaller than either of them, scrawnier even than Jack, but he had always commanded their respect, had insisted on it. He could not, however, stop the bad words now.
Jack looked at his son. “I done no grovelin’ when the French fired on
me
that day. Nor did thy brother.”
“ ’Twas that day I became a follower of the Gospel of Inward Light, when I saw Robby Bigelow’s face shattered because men chose to make war and call it holy. I make war on no man, nor do I grovel for any.”
“Instead thou goes to Boston and defies the Puritans like a damn fool.” Jack looked at Autumnsquam. “Gets himself banished from the Massachusetts Colony, he does. Gets his ears cut off for good measure.”
“White men know good torture. Now know good talk, father, son, both.” Autumnsquam whacked a forearm against Jack’s chest, then Christopher’s. His whales’-tooth bracelet jangled like a shaman’s bag of bones. His whales’-tooth necklace, which he wore like a collar, pressed angrily into his flesh. “Good talk. Talk good.”
But Jack kept his eyes on his son. “After Boston, he comes back to the Plymouth Colony and invites his Quaker friends to my island for a little Sabbath blasphemy.”
“ ’Tis no blasphemy to follow thy conscience and the Bible, ’stead of ministers and magistrates,” said Christopher. “And this island be mine as well as thine. We did terrorize defenseless priests and blackmail a grievin’ man to gain it. We each paid a piece of our soul for a bit of freedom. I use mine as I see fit.”