Country of the Bad Wolfes (4 page)

Mr Parham too had taken a shine to the captain and when Mary Margaret, after barely two months' society with the man, told her father they were in love and wanted to marry right away, he did not object. The next day he received Captain Wolfe at home and granted his request for his daughter's hand. Mary Margaret was pleased but had expected resistance. Ever since her childhood both her father and her mother, a comely and lettered woman who died when Mary Margaret was twelve, had many times warned her about sailors as a breed not prone to cleave close to the hearth. Her father's ready acceptance of the marriage convinced her he knew the real reason for her haste.

Her conviction was correct. Mr Parham had easily intuited Mary Margaret's compelling condition and knew it was not the less compelling for being as old as morality and as common as cliché. Given that the usual course of sailors in such a state of affairs was to abandon the girl to her shameful fate, the real surprise to Mr Parham was Captain Wolfe's willingness to marry Mary Margaret. It was testimony to the man's honor that he would not forsake mother and child to the disrepute of bastardy. But while Mr Parham had no doubt of his daughter's unreserved love for the captain, he knew the captain's love for her was of a different kind and that probably sooner rather than later the man could not help but break her heart.

On a crisp afternoon in early October they were wed in a maritime chapel overlooking Portsmouth Bay. The next six weeks were the happiest of Mary Margaret's life. The captain was only twice absent from home and for only a few days each time, once to Gloucester and once to Portland, on business which he did not confide and about which she did not inquire. He had told her little of his past, saying there was little enough to tell. His Irish father a boat builder by trade, his
English mother a beauty with a hearty laugh, both of them killed in a house fire when he was a child, and then a London orphanage until he ran away to sea. This bare synopsis was ample to her, as the man himself was her absorption. She liked to watch the play of his form as he axed cordwood, to see his enjoyment in meals of her making, to feel his fingers loosing her hair from its braid, to wake before him early of a morning and watch him still at sleep. To share in his love of dancing. Among her most joyful memories were those of high-stepping with him to the fiddles and pipes on a dancehall Saturday night. Sometimes when he was full of drink he would sing humorous bawdy songs and she would laugh even as she admonished him to mind his manners. He was a man of wit and easy laughter, she told her sons, and had a gift for telling a tale.

“Was he a good fighter?” Samuel Thomas once asked, his eyes avid. And was puzzled by the melancholic look his mother fixed upon him. Then she sighed and said yes, the captain could surely fight. She had witnessed the proof of it one busy evening in the tavern. There was a sudden commotion at the rear of the room and she looked over there to see a large man speaking angrily and pointing a finger in the captain's face, but she could not hear his words for the clamor of the crowd forming about them. Then she had to stand on a chair to see—and she nearly cried out at the sight of the man brandishing a long-bladed knife such as the shark-fishers used, and the captain barehanded. The circle of spectators moved across the floor with the two men as the sharker advanced on the captain with vicious swipes of the knife. She mimicked the sharker's action—
swish swish swish
—and how the captain hopped rearward with his arms outflinging at each pass of the blade. Her eyes were brighter than she knew as she reenacted the fight for her sons, who were spellbound. Then a heavy tankard came to the captain's hand, and in his next sidestep of the knife he struck the sharker a terrific blow to the head, staggering him. Then hit him again and knocked him stunned and bloody-faced to the floor. He kicked away the knife and stood over him with an easy smile and the room thundered with bellows to finish him,
finish him
! The man was on all fours when the captain clubbed him on the crown with the tankard and he buckled like a hammered beef. The walls shook with cheering. The unconscious sharker was dragged away by the heels to be deposited in the alley. The captain grinned whitely in the blackness of his beard and fired a cigar. Then his eyes found her still atop the chair and her hand to her mouth. And he winked.

“Yowwww. . . .” the twins said.

The more Mary Margaret told of him, the more vivid became her recollections—and more than once, as she described the captain's mischievous laugh or the cant of his sailor's walk or the distant cast of his eyes when he spoke of the open sea, she would be weeping before she was aware of it.

Came a cold November morning he told her he had been commissioned to transport a cargo out of Gloucester to Savannah and would be gone for perhaps
three months. And that afternoon, carpetbag in hand, he kissed her goodbye and patted her haunch, said, “Fare ye well, Maggie darlin,” and left her forever.

She of course did not divulge to her sons that she was already carrying them when she had stood at the altar with their father. She believed it was none of their affair and felt no qualm about keeping the secret. But her deliberate lies to them about the captain's true profession and mode of death troubled her and became ever harder to bear. They were nearly thirteen when she told them the truth. Indeed, let them read it for themselves, handing them the British Embassy's letter in evidence of the shameful facts. She was prepared for their shock and humiliation. Was prepared to tell them they had no call to feel disgrace, that their father's criminality was his own dishonor and in no way reflected on them. Their response was not what she was prepared for.

“A
pirate
!” Samuel Thomas said, turning to his brother. “A pirate
captain
!”

“Executed for
murder!
”“

“I'll wager it
wasn't
murder! I'll wager it was self-defense but he couldn't prove it!”

“I'll wager that even if it
was
murder he had good cause and whoever the fella was had it coming.”

Mr Parham, whom Mary Margaret had permitted to be present, chuckled at their exchange—then swallowed his smile and went mute under his daughter's furious scowl.

They begged to know more and were disappointed when she said she knew no more to tell. Did she at least know how he had been executed? Had he been hanged? Shot? Buried to his neck in the beach at low tide? She was appalled by their macabre questions and gesticulated in exasperation as she said she didn't
know
how he had met his end and didn't
care
, that it hardly mattered, after all.

The boys stared at her in wonder. How could such a thing not matter? They looked at each other and shrugged. They could not get enough of reading the letter and would henceforth handle it with the care of surgeons, lest it tear at the folds. Each wanted to be its keeper, so they tossed a coin that put it in John Roger's custody.

In days to follow, Mary Margaret would sometimes overhear them conversing about their father, speculating on his piratical prowess in comparison to the likes of William Kidd and Edward Teach the Blackbeard and other infamous sea raiders of the past, villains she'd many times heard mentioned in tavern discourse among grown men no less awed by them than were her sons. The twins wondered about his adventures, about duels he'd fought and ships he'd plundered and hapless captives he'd made to walk the plank. Mary Margaret rubbed her temples and sighed to hear them holding forth on keelhauling and how you had to be able to hold your breath
a long time and be tough enough to endure the barnacle cuts and be lucky enough that the sharks didn't get you before you were hauled back out. And because there was no telling what trials their own fortunes held in store and keelhauling might be among them, they thought it wise to take turns timing each other in the practice of holding their breath.

They were keenly intelligent boys and under Mary Margaret's tutelage had learned to read and write and cipher even before she hired the best teachers in town for them. She instructed them too in basic etiquette and social decorum. They had a liking for music of various sorts but the only instrument to catch their fancy was the hornpipe their Grandfather John had given them on their tenth birthday. He taught them to play that simple flute and a patron showed them how to dance the sailor's jig its music had been made for. They composed a ditty they entitled “Good Jolly Roger” and Mary Margaret sometimes heard one or the other of them piping it in the late evening behind the closed door of their room. It would always make her want to cry but she never asked them to cease.

Through their early childhood they were so nearly identical in appearance that, except for their mother and grandfather, few could distinguish between them. But around age twelve Samuel Thomas became the slightly huskier, John Roger the slightly taller and more perceptibly serious of mien. They were strong and nimble athletes, especially fond of swimming and wrestling and footracing. When they could find no other competitors, they contended with each other, and sometimes one of them won and sometimes the other, but as they grew older Samuel Thomas more and more often prevailed.

They loved the sea. They taught themselves to sail, to navigate and read the weather. Without their mother's knowledge and long before she thought them old enough to sail outside the harbor, they were piloting their catboat all the way to the Isles of Shoals. They were on the return leg of one such excursion when the fickle weather of early spring took an abrupt turn and the sky darkened and the sun vanished and the wind came squalling off the open sea. They were a half mile from the harbor when the storm overtook them. The rain struck in a slashing torrent and the swells hove them so high they felt they might be sent flying—then dropped them into troughs so deep they could see nothing but walls of water the color of iron. They feared the sail would be ripped away. Samuel Thomas wrestled the tiller and John Roger bailed in a frenzy and both were wide-eyed with euphoric terror as time and again they were nearly capsized before at last making the harbor. When they got home and Mary Margaret saw their sodden state she scolded them for dunces and wondered aloud how they could do so well in their schooling when they didn't have sense enough to get out of the rain.

When they turned thirteen, Mary Margaret enrolled them in the Madison
School—a local day institution that claimed itself the academic equal of Philips Exeter—paying for their tuition with money she'd saved over the years. And now a signal difference formed between them. John Roger grew to love academics above all else and gained recognition as the best student in the school. He read with omnivorous rapacity and phenomenal retention. He developed the habit of writing a critical summary of every book as soon as he finished reading it. He could with speed and accuracy solve arithmetic problems in his head. He had a natural aptitude for languages and by the age of fifteen was translating Cicero and could read French passably well. He developed an ardent interest in the law and hoped to matriculate at Dartmouth. Samuel Thomas, on the other hand, had become bored with schoolwork, though he continued to earn fair marks by dint of native intellect. The only books that still held his interest were atlases. He spent hours admiring the ships in the harbor. His main pleasures were now in prowling the waterfront alleys, in dicing, in fighting with his fists. Delivering fresh bedclothes to the boys' room one day while they were at school, Mary Margaret saw an atlas on Samuel Thomas's desk lying open to a map of the Gulf of Mexico. He had inked a circle around Veracruz and alongside it drawn a skull-and-crossbones with the notation, “Here lies Father.”

On the threshold of young manhood, the brothers were beardless duplicates of their sire, but Mary Margaret could see that Samuel Thomas had inherited the larger measure of his father's soul, and he was hence her greater worry. She at times wondered if religion might have served to temper his wilder nature and fretted that she'd been wrong to deny such moral instruction to her children. But even in girlhood she had spurned the prevalent Christian view of carnal pleasure as a Deadly Sin, an irreverence that had incited many a loud row with her mother, a devout Catholic.