Part 3

Just at the corner where Main Street meets the High Bank Road at South Dennis there stands a little, gray half-house that was built back in 1835 by Captain Eleazar Nickerson. Above the door there is a beautiful fan-light window to set this little house off from others of its kind in the village. Wisteria vines have broken their way through the porch flooring and press around the fan light and lilacs press against the corner of the house. It is now an empty house and a sad house and it will never again be quite the same house without Aunt Alice. But it will be there along the High Bank for many another year and it will be loved again and hear laughter again because it was built to endure. And it was built with great artistry from its exterior dentil to its fine old panelling. It will always be “Aunt Alice’s House”.

I had just reached the door of the old white church at South Dennis after a Sunday service when I felt a tug at my arm and turned to meet Aunt Alice. She was small and sparkling and it was difficult to believe that she was eightyish. She was neat as a pin and there was a twinkle in her eyes that betrayed a sense of humor and something in the way she held herself that spoke of great inner strength. She was full of enthusiasm for the Yarmouth Register and she wished to volunteer her services in any way she could be of help. So, at eighty, she became the village correspondent for the paper, gathering the news, putting it down in faultless English in a firm, precise hand, and prefacing it with an appropriate bit of verse that was like a breath of springtime in any season. The problems of other people were always of more importance to her than her own and it was sometime before I learned very much about her. When I did I knew that my new friend was one of the last living members of that large and courageous group of Cape women who had gone to sea.

Many a Cape bride followed her husband to sea, undergoing the dangers and inconveniences of that life in preference to the lonely night on the Cape, where she would be forever in fear of the news that she had joined the legion of women whom the sea had made widows. Many bore their children at sea and with a somehow pathetic zeal set about making a home of their husband’s vessels. It was something to be with their men, but with their best efforts at decorating, and making things snug, the rolling vessels were a far cry from the comfortable white cottages to which they hoped some day to retire, always within sight of the sea, but no more to be upon it.

Much of Aunt Alice’s strength must have come from her mother who, in 1882, travelled to New York with her ten-year old daughter, Alice, Alice’s sister Helen, and a large assortment of luggage, to board her husband’s three-masted bark, the Obed Baxter, for a trip to the other side of the earth. The vessel was bound for the Orient, carrying kerosene and oil for the lamps of China and, as the vessel pitched in the high seas of a northern February, oil fumes constantly escaped through the hatches. This, combined with the constant lurching and rolling of the vessel, gave all of the women a bad two weeks of seasickness where there was no cure and no hope except to get over it, and gain immunity. They did--and became as seaworthy as any members of the crew.

The skipper, Aunt Alice’s father, had done everything possible to recreate a normal existence for his family aboard the vessel. The cabins were fixed up as nearly as possible like a Cape Cod parlor, even to a parlor organ, which doubled for entertainment purposes during the week, and as church organ for the regular Sunday services aboard ship. There were rugs and easy chairs and real beds, and for the children there was a dog and a bowl of goldfish. On a top shelf of the main cabin stood a row of handsome crystal jars from which the children were given a daily ration of multi-colored hard candies. Education was not neglected, and a great store of schoolbooks had been brought aboard from which the children, under the watchful tutelage of their mother and father, completed their daily lessons. Each morning the Captain conducted a short religious service and each evening there were family readings from the Bible by the light of an oil lamp that swayed with the vessel as she drove westward. When schoolwork and household duties were completed, the children would wrap themselves in blankets and watch the cold waters slip by the prow of the ship. Hungrily they would watch for another sail upon the horizon and it would be an exciting moment when other American vessels drew near to signal navigation news and gossip of the home ports and of friends from the Cape.

Aunt Alice had departed New York on Washington’s Birthday and it was over three long months before the ship sighted land. Then it was the rather grim and forbidding bulk of Christmas Island that met their eyes rather than the soft and familiar outlines of a Cape Cod shore. Like many another traveller since, they must have felt that the magic of “Christmas” was a mis-nomer. But there were other lands ahead, all with surprises of their own. At Java Head a wild and noisy lot of nearly-naked, native traders swarmed aboard the vessel with live chickens and fresh fruit to sell and once the girls had conquered their fears at the strangeness of them they were full of gratitude for the change in bill-of-fare.

The “Obed Baxter” arrived at Shanghai on June 25, four months out of New York. The tumult and confusions of that port would have been startling in any case for the Cape Cod wife and her two small daughters but it was made more trying by the fact that the Captain’s sudden illness sent him to a hospital and left his family alone. Cape Cod spunk showed itself then as it would be called upon to show itself on many another occasion. Mrs. Baxter gathered her two children and secured quarters at one of the hotels of the city. From there they visited the hospital and found time to do some sight seeing as well. What an experience it must have been, with the mother called upon to act fearlessly in order to conceal her worst fears from the children! And all in a land that was many thousands of miles from the peaceful Main Street of South Dennis and full of strange sights, sounds and smells. As they walked the streets a horde of beggars, chattering fearfully, tore at their clothes and pushed against them so that it took the greatest control not to show fear. On one occasion the first mate became so infuriated at being jostled about that he pushed a Chinaman backwards. The coolie fell into a boat, broke his neck and died, and the mate was arrested and sent to prison. While awaiting trial he contracted the dreaded cholera that raged throughout the city and died. Now the father-Captain was ill and his First Mate dead, and the three Cape women were more alone than ever.

At last the Captain, though obviously far from well, was released from hospital and the family was united once more. While lying in harbor, waiting for an outward wind, they experienced a real typhoon which raised havoc with shipping in the harbor but fortunately did no damage to the “Obed Baxter”. Seeking shelter from the typhoon, other American Captains had entered the harbor. They must have looked awfully good to the South Dennis family. There was a Mr. Thacher from Yarmouth and Mr. Andrews of Woods Hole, (Woods Hole was only a two day buggy ride from Dennis, after all), and with other Americans, joined by the camaraderie of the sea, they formed an American neighborhood in the harbor of Shanghai. There was much visiting and exchange of gossip and presents and as the favorable wind held off there was opportunity to go again ashore, this time with friends and under more favorable circumstances. There was sightseeing, and souvenir hunting for Oriental whatnots that would someday grace the little parlor mantle back home, and there were ricksha rides for a nickel that made the once-a-year advent of the carousel at Hyannis seem tame and expensive by comparison.

After picking up the remainder of the cargo at Hong Kong for the homeward journey the “Obed Baxter” set sail for home. One of the greatest volcanic eruptions of modern times had taken place in the Java Sea which lent the sky a weird, bright orange tone so that every day was like a perpetual sunset. The girls occupied themselves with scooping baskets of pumice and lava from the sea which was gray for miles with the debris of the volcano. (Aunt Alice, when last I visited her, had a piece of this pumice at her kitchen sink and reported it excellent for scouring pots and pans.) The “Obed Baxter” plowed through the South Seas, through raging storms and high seas, and through the doldrums when the ship hung silent and listless on a sea of glass. And then, while still thousands of miles from home, real tragedy struck the vessel with the death of the Captain.

Now the widowed mother and two small daughters faced a real test of courage and control. The ship was under the command of the Second Mate, who had only recently been promoted from ordinary seaman by the Captain. He had learned his lessons well, however, and there was nothing to do but go on. Aunt Alice’s mother stood fast on one point. Her husband’s remains were not to be committed to the sea but they must rest where he would have wanted to rest, on the hill at South Dennis. An understanding crew prepared the remains as best they could and, after a brief religious service, the flag-draped casket was secured upon the deck for the long voyage home. Then, after nearly a year away, “the Obed Baxter,” her flag flying at half mast for its departed skipper, made New York. Now it was left to the mother to organize the trip back to the Cape where she must begin a new kind of life ashore. They had travelled across and back a limitless and hungry sea to the other side of the earth in a small vessel that, save for the skills at the helm, was at the will of the wind. They had encountered typhoon and volcano, wild waves and listless calms, disease and death, and one hundred and one moments of the terrors of the unknown. But life went on, and you thanked your God that it had been no worse, for, in a sea-going community, the sea had claimed so many, and brought about such tragedy, that Cape people stood up to the buffets of life as bravely as their stout vessels stood up to the angry seas of the world. This was part of the strength that I had felt in Aunt Alice from our first meeting. It was a strength that came from an abiding faith in God and in His sense of the fitness of things--in an era when the living was not easy, and only the strong survived.

But along with spiritual strength Aunt Alice had many another attribute. At eighty, her one intolerance was for other people who were so concerned with being old that they had no eyes for the wonderful world about them, and particularly for the natural wonders of Cape Cod, its land and its four seas. She loved lights and laughter and music, and they were as important to her at eighty as they had been at eight, when she would dance and sing for the amusement of her sea-faring father. Once, when a play was produced by a local group in Liberty Hall at South Dennis, I foolishly expressed surprise when she told me she had attended both performances, and been among the first ones there. “Why,” she exclaimed! “Do you think I could stay to home doing nothing while all that excitement was going on right across the street?” But she could never have just “done nothing”. While she washed her dishes her mind was busy composing little verses, and when her household chores were done she would attend to a voluminous correspondence, or an item of news for the Yarmouth Register, or perhaps sort out her memories of her sea voyage as she looked at the oil painting of the “Obed Baxter” that hung in her parlor. She could reminisce about bygone days when she attended the first class of the new High School at South Dennis, or when she and her husband sang duets at the services in the old white church on Main Street, but she never dwelt upon the past, because she was too interested in what the morrow might bring.

The little house at the corner of Main Street and the High Bank at South Dennis is empty now and lonesome and soon the signs of her not being there to “put it to rights” will commence to show. I miss my visits at the old house, but I shall always remember--and thankfully--a fine friendship that gave me much to remember and an insight into the kind of character that led Cape people to achieve greatness around the world.

SOME NIGHT BEFORES

If there is one thing above another upon which a Cape man has always prided himself it is his independence. Let them take what courses of action they will on the Mainland, and let them subscribe to whatever conventions they admire, the Cape man will make his own mind up about the issues before subscribing to them. It is a tradition that has not been easily come by, which back at the beginnings of American history involved sacrifice and heroism and the expenditure of the skills and treasure of the people, on the land and on the sea. In the year 1776, several of the Cape towns met and gave their approval to a Declaration of Independence from Great Britain a month before the official Declaration was issued on that memorable and long ago July the Fourth. The news of the Declaration on the first Fourth was a cause for almost universal great joy and celebration throughout the Cape and the spirit of independence that reigned that night has reigned in succeeding celebrations right up to the present time. The Night before the Fourth took on a very special and unique flavor on the Cape. Its nearest counterpart on the Mainland would be the old-fashioned Halloween in the pre-“trick-or-treat” era, together with a celebration of Freedom and Independence that had some of the characteristics of License. This was the night when the violent ringing of church bells on midnight of the Third of July would usher in a night of revelry and pranks into which had gone a full year’s planning. At least some of the sons of the Sons of Liberty declared themselves, for one night, to be beyond the law. Vested authority became fair game on the Night before and to them and to the more grouchy or less-popular citizens of the village there always befell the dubious honor of being among the first to have their outhouses overturned amidst the boom and flare of giant firecrackers and the sound of running, revolutionary feet down the sandy streets of the village. The dawn’s early light would reveal the still-smouldering ashes of Main Street bon-fires and of gruesome figures burned in effigy. It would reveal mysteriously-displaced store signs and the incongruous sight of carriages and wagons ingeniously hoisted to a precarious position upon the rooftops of the village. The first light of the holiday would also reveal the formation of the horribles parade that would commence on Main Street and wind its way through the village to the delight of younger children whose eyes were heavy from a sleepless night of anticipation. These were now armed with hoarded firecrackers of their own and the biggest hero among them was he who had contrived the loudest explosion. The horribles wore fantastic masks and old clothes and they rode in ancient and decrepit vehicles of the town that had been borrowed or appropriated by night requisition.

The horribles parade marked the end of a night of freedom and confusion and made way for the more formal celebrations of the day. Then came the characteristic Cape clambake with the wonderful aroma of steaming sea-weed and shellfish replacing the acrid smell of punk and gunpowder. Then came the band concerts with the handsomely-uniformed bandsmen tooting the “Stars and Stripes” at its very loudest to replace the sound of exploding firecrackers. Where they failed, the inevitable speeches of visiting politicians and local patriots nearly succeeded. (It was a good time for grass-roots campaigning and the subject matter provided by the Fourth of July could not have been more popular.) As darkness fell, many of the villages supplied a formal fireworks display, sky rockets and handsome set-pieces, where suddenly out of the darkness there appeared in flaming color the unmistakable likenesses of Washington and Lincoln, of the fife and drums of the “Spirit of Seventy Six” and at last, amidst the final “ohs and ahs” of the deliciously happy and weary multitude, Old Glory herself, handsomer and prouder than ever as she wove in the mechanical breeze of the soft July night. They were great days and happy days, something to be looked forward to and talked about for many months. But however fine the day, however well-contrived the day’s celebration it was the story of the antics of the Night Before which always lived the longest. For it was then that vested authority was often enticed to look aside from the surging spirit of independence--and leadership passed, for a time, into the hands of the town’s high-spirited young men, frequently led by the Town’s Bad Boy.

Most of the villages had their Bad Boy just as they had their Fool. He was usually an over-sized, over-aged, juvenile delinquent, a perpetual adolescent who, nevertheless, had an ingenuity for thinking up unique outrages that made him the recipient of a kind of perverse admiration. In the village where I grew up the Bad Boy title was universally awarded to Henry.

Henry, in spite of a wide streak of plain badness, was a man of unquestioned charm, and the possessor, when he cared to avail himself of them, of extraordinary native wit, skill, and intelligence. He was a good hand aboard a fishing vessel, an expert mason, a better-than-average carpenter, a wit and raconteur, and to the mutual misfortune of himself and society in general, he was also a rare man with a bottle and a glass. A wise employer would pay Henry his wages only at the very completion of a job if he ever expected to see him again. This was entirely satisfactory with Henry who was aware of his own weakness and had the greatest respect for employers who treated him accordingly. For when pay day for Henry came at last, a week or more of outstanding celebration would follow, just as surely as the night the day. One such celebration ended with his return from New York in a taxi with a monkey and a parrot for fellow passengers. Directing the driver to a neat, white house, Henry requested him to wait while he went inside for the money with which to pay the fare. The driver has obviously been impressed with the easy manner and good fellowship of Henry but, after some minutes had passed without sign of his fare, the driver hurried to the door of the house. An elderly and gentile Cape lady answered the hasty knock.

“Where is your husband?”, the cabbie demanded.

“My husband?”, echoed the good lady. “My husband has been dead for twelve years!”

Of course it was so and there was nothing to do about it. Henry, knowing that his Cape neighbors were not much for locking doors, had casually let himself in at the front and, without being seen, made a quick exit out the back, into the safety of neighboring woods and familiar haunts.

Henry’s episodes generally took place during the spring and summer months because he planned on spending the cold days at Barnstable, enjoying the warmth, food and hospitality of the County Jail. He was always expected there then, and he hardly ever varied the routine. He was popular with fellow inmates and with prison personnel and, if his crimes were frequent, they were always of a comparatively minor nature. Once, though, he betrayed the rules of hospitality and it can be believed that his hosts must have taken a very dim view of it, indeed. That was the time when Henry, having completed one of many sentences, emerged into a bustling Cape springtime looking considerably stouter than usual. It was not surprising. A mile or so down the road he drew a prison blanket from under his swollen coat and sold it at a bargain price to an unsuspecting householder. With these funds he obtained a bottle and commenced the celebration of his release.

Henry, whose spirit of independence knew no limits and who knew better, nevertheless, took the attitude that a certain village constable, who then was the only force of law and order in the village, was the sole cause of his various “persecutions”. In the village for many years life became a constant kind of cat-and-mouse game between them. The constable was probably a good man, who in a town that was almost without crime was hardly called upon to be a brave one, but he had an almost overwhelming sense of the importance of his own position and it was probably that trait that made him the everlasting butt of the revellers of the Night Before the Fourth. On that night, his home, on the lonely outskirts of the village, would become an armed camp while he, with a carefully-polished badge of authority on his chest and shot-gun on his knees, prepared to withstand an assault which never failed to materialize and never failed of success. His outhouse toppled readily like a leaf before the storm, firecrackers boomed beneath his veranda and beneath the very window where he sat in the darkness. Each time he peered from behind his curtain the assault began anew. Finally, as the first gray light of Independence Day filtered across the eastern sky he would be hung in effigy in his own dooryard.

Henry was usually at the head of the attacking forces, of course, and it was Henry, of course, who conceived the idea of giving our Constable a memorable ride on one Night Before the Fourth. In the village cemetery, in those days, there rested an ancient town hearse, a curious, horse-drawn vehicle that was shaped like an elaborate coffin on wheels and whose walls and top were entirely of glass. So it happened that, on one Night-Before, the hearse was quietly pulled up to the Constable’s house and he, protesting violently but uselessly, was placed within it, listening to the heavy clasp close above him, an unwilling captive in a glass cage on wheels. Then with great ceremony, in the manner of Timberlane home from the wars, the procession and its prisoner wound through the village streets. When, at length, the conquerors tired of the sport the constable was abandoned in the middle of Main Street where the first light of day and the earliest-rising villagers discovered him in his glass prison. Law and order was restored and he was released to try to restore his lost dignity. He never really did--but he did learn that when some Cape Codders went out to celebrate their independence they really meant it. For, ever after, on the afternoon of the Night Before, our Constable could be seen driving his Model T in the general direction of the canal with never a look backward towards our village. On the morning of the fifth he would be back with us, his badge freshly shined and his billy-club at the ready to maintain law and order for another year--or, at least for another 364 days.

Henry would never have served as a model of deportment on the Cape and his good neighbors deplored his multitudinous misconducts. But his crimes were generally petty and they had a Falstaffian flavor which made him something of a legend. At one time or another you might find his counterpart in any Cape village, and in a day when bad movies had not been replaced by bad talking movies, and when radio had not even suspicioned television, Henry’s latest escapades provided pretty good conversation during long winter evenings on the Cape. Certainly the celebration of Independence Day could not have been the same without him.

SOME PURVEYORS OF NOSTRUMS