But the well had dried up in a few days! Its sweet pure water had turned sandy, and then muddy; and then it had dried up. Some said it was a witch-well, and had never had any water at all—only the illusion of water. But by then, naturally, the dishonest Yankee had made his escape, and no one could guess where he might be found.
A wiser man than John Jay Zinn might have allowed that the incident had indeed transpired, perpetrated by another pedlar; but that he, out of a sense of obligation, or sympathy for the villagers, would make proper restitution. A wiser man, surely, would have refrained from shouting back at his drunken tormentors, and suggesting that they were naught but fools and knaves in any case. But John Jay Zinn was not a wise man, nor, I fear, a man in whose heart a lucid moral sense had been cultivated; and so he argued with the ruffians, and scuffled with them, and soon all the rabble had gathered, and a small tub of tar was being heated in the blacksmith’s shop nearby, and there were war whoops and Indian yells, and no lawman within earshot who gave a fig for the pedlar’s fate, and so—and so it happened that John Jay Zinn suffered that excruciating torture of being “tarred and feathered,” an American folk-custom still thought, by those unaware of its brutality, to be faintly risible. The tar was brushed and poured on him in great steaming gobs, and soon the moonlit autumnal calm was shattered by his screams of agony, and the poor child in the haybarn awakened in terror, and the bestial prank, once begun, could not be stopped. For one thing, the villagers expressed surprise and delight that the pedlar could be made to feel pain at all: they had imagined him a being unlike themselves, whom no one could seriously injure!
(Ignorant, subhuman creatures, the reader may safely conclude: a people so accursèd with bestiality as to give credence to the utterances of such Americans as John Randolph and Alexander Hamilton, who doubted from the first the value, let alone the possibility, of Democracy. As for their hapless victim, John Jay Zinn—it is very difficult for me to speak. I see him, I believe, as clearly as I have ever seen any living person, tho’ in fact I have never literally set eyes upon him, but have been empowered, so to speak, to imagine him, through the recollections of his son; I am capable of “hearing” his voice too, hawking his wares, in one little settlement after another, along the endless ribbon of road that is our nation, lonely to the core, and eluding God’s own blessing. His preacher’s coat, his eccentric hat, his wooden face and unblinking eyes, the way he leaned upon his staff when no one but John Quincy was a witness, sighing with arthritic pain . . . His solitude, his chilling and relentless industry, so without ambition, and without evidence of a soul . . . I see, I hear, I tremble with apprehension for his fate, and share with his wretched son the terror of that night; and yet I cannot know him.
Nor do I wish to know him, despite my natural Christian pity for the suffering he endured, a “martyr’s” death of a sort, it may be; and the probability of a harsh divine retribution to follow.
That he was the father of our hero is certainly a puzzle, and yet it cannot be an edifying one, and I will not dwell upon it. Pity for the repulsiveness of his death soon crumbles in the face of a profound instinctual displeasure in his being, and a reluctant but incontestable rejection of the immoral life he led. Poor man! poor sinner! That you existed at all, let alone as the father of John Quincy Zinn, argues for the inscrutability of God’s ways!—and, it may be, for His vast all-inclusive Love.)
THE EIGHT-YEAR-OLD BOY, precociously wise, seemed to know upon the instant of his startl’d awakening not only what was happening in the village, but to whom it was happening; and tho’ he fully grasped the nature of the danger to himself (both as the pedlar’s son, and as a witness from the outside world to the crime), and was shivering and whimpering with sheer animal fright, he nonetheless ran after the boisterous mob, calling over and over Father! Father!— a more piteous and heartrending spectacle, one cannot wish to imagine.
Alas, the child did witness his father’s ignominious death—the aftermath of the tarring and feathering, which involved a clumsy attempt at hanging, and the setting aflame of the limp (and perhaps, by then, lifeless) body, to the noisy satisfaction of the crowd. He heard, he saw, he cried out “Father—!” but there was no help for the doomed man, and no help for the child, who very narrowly escaped with his own life when certain members of the crowd turned their attentions upon him, and quickly calculated, despite their drunkenness, the threat he represented.
There is a tale of my illustrious compatriot Hawthorne’s, set in remote Colonial times, in which a youth seeks a wealthy kinsman only to discover that the elderly Major has been tarred and feathered, in protest of British authority, and dragged along in an uncovered cart by a torchlit procession; the persecuted old man is described by Mr. Hawthorne as possessing, even in his humiliation, a “tar-and-feathery dignity.” And so absurd is the spectacle, so infectiously merry, that the ingenuous young kinsman joins in the crowd’s laughter! One cannot fault Mr. Hawthorne for the precision of his prose style, here as elsewhere, or for the stern wisdom of his vision, but one must question whether “dignity” of any sort is available when one is in excruciating agony from burns to the flesh; or whether laughter, however infectiously communal, is an appropriate human response, to so lurid a sight.
Surely few amidst even that crowd of wretches laughed with true merriment at the death throes of their victim, a bizarre sight in the flames—so erratically covered with white goose feathers, his face seemed hardly human. And the victim’s young kinsman, stricken with terror, had no thought now but to escape with his life, his father’s life being lost.
And so, pursued by several burly louts, including a beardless drunken youth not many years older than himself, John Quincy ran into the woods—he ran, and ran, and ran—deep into the woods—deep into the chill eerie gloom, where the moonlight could not penetrate, while behind him shouts and whoops rang out, as if it were all a game. He ran until his breath came in shreds, and his small heart beat madly in his chest; and at last, after a very confused space of time, the shouts behind him grew fainter, and dissolved into the night; and a forlorn whooooing that must have been the call of an owl, was all that sounded.
In a virtual convulsion of shivering, of both cold and terror, the pathetic child crawled into a thicket to hide; and, when he believed he had brought his trembling under control, he scrambled out, and climbed a tree—a many-branchèd oak—clumsily and yet with great industry he climbed, and climbed—until his hands, though callused, began to bleed—and still he climbed the great oak—the vision of his defiled father behind him—and the start of the licking flames—and the shouts and whoops of his tormentors—and still he climbed, panting, near-sobbing, until, like a fairy child in one of the old legends, he emerged at last from the gloom of the forest, and entered into the moonlight’s realm once more, dazed and exhausted, yet withal not without a sense of animal relief, judging himself (however prematurely) safe from his father’s murderers.
So John Quincy Zinn climbed the great oak, his nails torn and his fingers bleeding, and did manage to save himself, the spark of life being so courageous within him. At the top of the tree he secured himself into a kind of cradle, and, clinging to the rough-bark’d trunk, he drifted off into a light, chaotic sleep, waking some time later—how long, he could not hope to judge—to a renewed commotion of voices and footsteps, and an occasional crashing in the underbrush. A lone high-pitched voice arose, a stranger’s voice: “Little John Quincy,” the voice called, “your father is asking for you, your father wants you by his side, where are you hiding,” the voice approached, and then faded, “are you in the bushes here, are you up a tree, come down, little John Quincy,” the voice drew nearer suddenly, “come down, I say, come out of hiding, don’t you know your father wants you, your father is very angry, he wants you by his side, come down, boy, come here—”
But the prescient child, clinging to the great trunk, stayed exactly where he was.
TWENTY-THREE
Thus, the unspeakable evils of drink an
d dissipation; and an indelicacy of comportment so extreme as to render all moral judgment superfluous. It is no wonder that the young John Quincy Zinn became an avowed abstainer from drink, and an enthusiastic supporter of the Temperance Movement; and that, many years later—ah, it is a mercy to count how many!—he frequently joined his womenfolk in the parlor, around the piano (which Mrs. Zinn, Malvinia, and Octavia played in turn, being more gifted than Samantha and Constance Philippa), and sang with them, in a voice that never faltered, one or another of the great old Temperance songs. Tho’ many were published in sheet music form, and even the least inspired offered wisdom, it is Henry Clay Work’s superb “Come Home, Father,” that best expressed the spirit of the movement, and the pathos of the child victimized by parental neglect. This melancholy but beautifully melodic tale of a young girl sent to fetch her father from the tavern, that he might kiss his dying son goodnight, must have awakened unfortunate memories in Mr. Zinn’s heart; yet of course he gave no indication, and the tear or two he might have surreptitiously wiped from his eyes, as the plaintive chorus echoes, again and again—
Hear the sweet voice of the child,
Which the nightwinds repeat as they roam!
Oh, who could resist this most pleading of prayers?
“Please, father, dear father, come home!”
—this tear, I venture, seemed no more than an o’erspilling of the sentiment of the moment, and could have awakened no undue curiosity in Mrs. Zinn or the sisters. For even the approximate nature of Mr. Zinn’s childhood was unknown to them; and prudently so.
NINETEEN YEARS AFTER the events of that horrific night, when pressed to deliver himself of the particulars of his background by the Honorable Godfrey F. Kiddemaster, who had summoned him out to Kiddemaster Hall in Bloodsmoor, for a private meeting, John Quincy Zinn looked his prospective father-in-law frankly in the eye, and spoke of domestic tragedy ensuing in part from family illnesses, and in part from impoverishment; he spoke briefly of having spent an intermittent period of time, as a boy, in the hire of farmers in the Blue Mountain region—German, Dutch, Quaker. They were good people, he averred, and treated him well: tho’ naturally he was expected to work hard.
He had always been mechanical-minded, and gifted with his hands; but it was in ’45 or ’46, he told Judge Kiddemaster, a faint blush stealing over his cheeks, at the confusion and, as it were, displeasure of speaking so lengthily about himself, that he deemed himself born: born into a sense not only of the miraculous interweaving of spirit that constitutes the Visible Universe, but to a sense of his own place within it, and, it may be said, his own Destiny.
This felicitous awakening was occasioned by his having come upon, in a bookseller’s stall in Allentown, the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a name altogether new to him (for he was only seventeen or eighteen at the time, and, tho’ decidedly bookish for a rural youth, and set apart from his contemporaries by a unique liveliness of intelligence, he was a farmboy without doubt); a name, and a voice, and a commandeering vision hardly to be resisted. He quickly scanned the great essay “Nature,” whilst standing at the bookstall, his trembling hands shaking the page, and thrilled to the wisdom therein, that the Supreme Being does not create nature about us, but puts it forth through us; that we are immortal, for we learn that time and space are relations of matter, and that, with a perception of truth or a virtuous will, they have no affinity.
A man, John Quincy Zinn dared to lecture Judge Kiddemaster (whom he suspected of wishing to interrupt—for Prudence’s father had drawn breath, and was staring most intently at John Quincy), a man is after all fashioned by Nature, and indebted to the culture of the past only as its Master; and he must express himself in action in order to influence society, not hide away in his study, or in the woods, or in one or another comfortable retreat from responsibility. It was of course John Quincy Zinn’s ambition—to which he hesitated to give the grand name Destiny—to influence his nation by the labor of his brain and hands, joining with that American Destiny as one individual among many, grateful for the opportunity even, if need be, to sacrifice himself.
The older man regarded him with pale, somewhat frosty eyes, and for a long imperious moment did not choose to reply. Behind and above him, to the left, were six handsome silver tankards (by Paul Revere, in fact—tho’ young John Quincy did not know this at the time); to the right, in stately calf bindings, with gilt-stamped titles, the collected works of Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Lord Macaulay. No smile softened the Judge’s stern expression (tho’ his young opportuner had been smiling a great deal, and freely perspiring); it may even have been the case that his proud posture grew stiffer. And yet his words were gentle—and gently offered. He said, as John Quincy Zinn leaned eagerly forward, as if to hear a verdict handed down, alas, from the bench! “My dear boy, you are young: but you will not always be so.”
IT MAY BE that the reader, despite repugnance for such details as I have felt constrained to record, in connection with the problematic matter of John Quincy Zinn’s orphaning, harbors some small curiosity as to the aftermath of the child’s escape, for I have left him, I recall of a sudden, at the very top of a many-branchèd oak; and no succor in view.
Strange it was, this aftermath; tho’ no stranger, I must conclude, than much that has transpired, and will transpire, in my chronicle. For in the chill light of dawn young John Quincy awakened to the sound of a woman’s voice far below, and tho’ he gripped the tree trunk with an instinctive cunning, and did not for some time allow himself even to glance downward (as if fearing so subtle a movement might attract attention), he seemed to understand at once, that the full-throated warmth of this voice, however unfamiliar to him, promised a genuine aid. “Good morn, little boy, do you hear me, are you up there?—little boy?—yes?—will you come down?—and quickly, quickly!—for there is no time to spare.”—So the strange voice wafted up to him, and after no more than a minute’s hesitation, during which time his red-rimmed eyes worked furiously in his head, the child’s heart relaxed: and he made the decision, which quite altered the course of his remarkable life, to trust the voice, and to climb down.
And so, indeed, he did. With that cautious and somewhat awkward precision of a cat, lowering itself from a height it has scaled with great alacrity.
In silence John Quincy Zinn returned to the ground, where stood a woman he had never before set eyes upon, yet seemed in a way to know: of no more than modest height, yet sturdy and full-bodied, with a strong jaw, and ruddy cheeks, and glistening eyes that belied the severe furrowing of her brow. She urged him to hurry; clucked at him impatiently; would have caught him in her strong arms and pulled him down, from a height of perhaps five feet, had he not jumped to the ground. She wore a plum-colored cape of coarse wool, with a hood that nearly covered her braided hair, and might have been in her mid-thirties, or younger; she was carrying a woollen blanket, which she immediately draped about John Quincy’s shoulders.
“Now come with me, do not tarry: for we have a journey before us,” she said, taking him immediately by the hand, and pulling him along. He did not resist: had no thought of resisting: but obeyed her without a scruple. Indeed, it was a measure of the eight-year-old orphan’s trust in this woman, as well as the desperation of his plight, that he had no thought to draw away from her, but had in fact to resist a sudden need to burrow into her embrace, and burst into wanton tears. “Come, come,” she murmured, taking no time to glance at him, but rubbing his raw, chafèd, cold-stiffened fingers with hers, “it is already dawn, and more than dawn; and we must set you on your way. God has His plans for you, my son—but we must make haste.”
She strode resolutely forward, and he followed, his panting breath turned to vapor. Haste!—they must make haste! After some strenuous minutes his knees buckled and he would have collapsed, had his able benefactress not caught him in her arms, and borne him aloft. She carried him out of the depths of the forest into an open place, a hilly meadow—and then down a steep incline—and finally to a lane
, where a horse-drawn wagon awaited; and the driver, with a muttered exclamation, leapt down to offer aid. John Quincy was now but partly conscious: he had a confused impression of a rough-hewn but kindly face, and a pair of small, keen, dark eyes, as stronger arms bundled him up into the wagon, and hid him beneath the blanket and a layer of damp hay.
And then off—off they galloped, into the fresh chill mists of an autumn dawn in the mountains. The Devil himself might have been in pursuit, the driver so urged his horse forward, and the old wagon groaned and creaked.
So the pedlar’s son was rescued, and carried some thirty-five miles away, to a farming region north of Germantown, on the Granitehill River: which distance might have been a thousand miles from the village in which his father was tarred and feathered, for in those days the valleys had little to do with one another, and village looked with uninquisitive suspicion upon village. News spread slowly, if at all; the fact that a parentless young boy was taken in by a Dutch farm family near Germantown, was a fact of virtually no interest to anyone.
How John Quincy came to be brought to the Van Dusens, and why the woman in the plum-colored cape rescued him, were not questions the boy asked himself at the time; nor did he exhibit much curiosity about the past, as the years unfolded. He quite readily adapted to his new family, discovering himself the youngest of five children, and as zealous as the oldest boy (some nine years his senior) when it came to work in the fields, and in and around the barns. He was so profoundly grateful for his having been rescued, and years on the road as a pedlar’s son had so accustomed him to fortuities of all kinds, he demonstrated little surprise at his fate; and perhaps even his nights were dreamless—for he worked very hard, and took an evident satisfaction in his labor.