The Hessian

Howard Fast

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317456469
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Politique et relations internationales
• Categoria: Politique

"Fast is always a wonderful storyteller, and the story is a good one.... Entertaining and memorable". -- Library Journal

1 The Priest

DOI: 10.4324/9781315699646-1

TOWARD FOUR O’CLOCK of an afternoon in middle May, the priest appeared, and the following day the whole thing began. It was the priest who told me about the ship in the Sound.

The priest came riding up the road from Norwalk on a donkey—so small a donkey that the rider’s feet barely topped the ground, and the priest was a very small man indeed, no more than five feet and three inches, about forty-five years old, with a small protruding belly and a round moon face, pink and sweaty, from which two bloodshot and tired pale blue eyes regarded the world without optimism and yet without despair. It had suddenly turned hot, the first heat of early summer, and momentarily the glowing new green of springtime seemed dusty and old. Somewhere the priest had lost his hat, and the sun was turning his bald head the color of ripe apples.

Mrs. Feversham and I were in the herb garden, where I was directing Rodney Stephan how to prune the grape arbor—not that grapes are anything to speak of in this wretched Connecticut soil—when I saw the priest and his donkey top the rise and come down the road toward the house. My wife pointed toward the manifestation and wondered what it could be, and I replied that it appeared to be a priest on a donkey.

“A clergyman?”

“In a manner of speaking. I would guess that this poor devil is a Roman Catholic priest, and what twist of fate brought him into this holy nest of Protestantism I can only guess. In any case, we’ll soon find out.”

Then I walked through the garden to the road and waited for him, watching him silently as he brought his donkey to a halt, climbed out of a makeshift straw saddle, mopped his brow and wiped his face with a dirty kerchief, and then crossed himself and muttered a few words of gratitude, not to me but to God. The blue eyes then returned my inquiry.

“Feversham?”

“Feversham,” I agreed.

“Doctor Feversham?”

“If you will.”

“My name is Father Hesselman,” he then informed me, “and I am a Roman Catholic priest—if you will—” with a slight smile, “and I am very thirsty and my ass hurts with all the agonies of the damned. Not my donkey, sir, my ass. I am cursed with boils.”

I nodded thoughtfully and understandingly, and my wife meanwhile, who is less thoughtful and understanding but more practical, sent Rodney to us with a clay mug of cold water out of the well. It was a full quart and the priest drained down the whole of it. The little man was thirsty.

When I had him in my surgery on his belly, washing his ass with rum and then lancing the boils and draining them, he explained his hurt when it came to rejection. He was a sensitive little man and was of the stuff that makes poor martyrs, and it made me shudder to think of the pain of sitting day after day on those boils.

“Why the devil did you not go to Doctor Phillips in Norwalk?”

“I went to Doctor Cutler,” he answered apologetically.

“Don’t wriggle. Cutler could have lanced them.”

“He said I was a journeyman from hell. Oh—that one hurt! I think those were his words. He felt that boils were more or less a proper retribution on the part of the Almighty.”

“Retribution for what? Don’t wriggle,” I cautioned him.

“For being a priest.”

“What!”

I went deeper in my anger than I had intended, and the poor man whimpered softly.

“Sorry, Father. Did Cutler say that?”

“More or less.”

“That filthy, leprous second-rate bastard!”

“That’s very hard on him, Mr. Feversham. Consider the man in his surroundings—”

“We will talk about compassion later.”

“—and if these are not a sign of God’s displeasure—”

“They are most certainly a sign of drinking dirty water and eating bad food. How did you get to me, Father Hesselman?”

“There you are. There is something to speak for Doctor Cutler. He told me there was a Catholic doctor up on the Ridge and he even showed me the road to follow.”

“Which opens the gates of heaven, doesn’t it? Now listen, Father, can you spend a day or two off the back of your donkey? I have drained the boils and dressed them but they want a bit of coddling.”

“I have weak arches,” he apologized.

I nodded sympathetically and asked him to stay for dinner. He had a clean cassock with him, and after he had shaved and washed himself, he appeared to be a most pleasant man indeed. He blessed our table and then dug into the roast ham as if he had not eaten in a fortnight. As perhaps he had not.

I had put a good French wine on the table in honor of our guest—the first Catholic priest I had seen in a long, long time—and he drank it with relish and appreciation. It was pleasant to see the little man come to life, praising and admiring all the elements that go to create a little touch of civilization on the Connecticut High Ridge, our silver, our linen, our china, our food; and with his belly full and his soul satisfied, he leaned back and ventured to ask whether I was still a Catholic.

“I should imagine the Holy Father has more important business than my excommunication.”

“That’s an answer that is no answer.”

“Well, sir, Father Hesselman,” I said, “I have not made my confession for more than five years, I have not prayed with a pure heart, I have hated and not admon ished myself not to hate, and of course I have not set foot in a Catholic church for quite a while. I am married to a Protestant woman”—I nodded toward my wife —“withal a lovely one, but I coddle my conscience by never setting foot in a Protestant church either. For three years I led a regiment against the British, not because I love the colonies but because I hate the damned English, who put my father to death for no other reason than that he was a Catholic; so if I were bored as hell with being a Catholic for any other and every other reason, I would remain one because the British are not. There’s your answer.”

“It’s exceedingly complex and I am not sure that I follow it entirely,” Father Hesselman said.

“I suppose so.”

“It is the manner of being a doctor,” my wife, Alice, put in. “Brusque but kindly. It has become a habit with him.”

“Not kindly,” I said sharply.

“Why did you leave the army?” the priest asked me. “Have you soured?”

“Have you?” I answered with annoyance. “Or are you some damn Tory?”

“Evan!” my wife cried.

Father Hesselman regarded me without rancor and gave me to understand that his church had been used as a hospital for over three years now.

“Then I am sorry, sir. Forgive me.”

The priest smiled, and I realized that the half bottle of wine had made him pleasantly relaxed and moderately drunk.

“Where is your church?” I asked him.

“In Baltimore, where a Catholic is hardly less common than a Protestant.”

“And where are you bound for, if I may ask?”

“Rhode Island, where nine Catholic families asked that a priest be sent to them, and thus my fortune and perhaps their misfortune.”

“Why never,” said Alice. “I consider them fortunate indeed.”

“May they consider themselves thus, dear lady,” Father Hesselman replied.

“But why are you here on the Ridge? Why didn’t you take ship and save yourself the misery of that stupid beast you ride?”

“My donkey and I are fond of each other. I try to be less a burden and more a companion.”

“That’s a beast that not even a saint could love.”

“You are being utterly impossible,” my wife said to me. “What will the good father think?”

“I can damn well guess what he thinks. Put him down in this nest of long-nosed righteousness, and he will think likewise. As I do. Meanwhile, he regards me as an insolent, vulgar, irascible and godless man, and perhaps he is right. I soured,” I told the priest, “but that isn’t why I am here. Have I not right to be here? I’m a physician, and work at my trade. I took a shot in my leg and I walk with a gimp, as you may have noticed.”

“I noticed,” the priest said sadly.

“Evan, Evan,” said Alice, “we sit at dinner and not at a committee meeting.”

“And if you came up from New York,” I demanded of the priest, “why did you not take passage on some packet?”

“There’s a British frigate in the Sound.”

“Hah!”

“I saw it with my own eyes, Doctor Feversham.”

“Where?”

“At anchor off the rivermouth. What do you people call it now? Salituk?”

“Saugatuck.”

“Right. There she was, with ship’s boats going back and forth. They were slaughtering meat. Soldiers standing all around and keeping guard.”

“Redcoats?”

“No—oh, no.”

“How near were you?”

“On the King’s road—maybe two hundred paces away. But my eyes are good. Soldiers in green coats with yellow facings. Black boots, white kneebreeches—”

“Yes, Hessians.” I added as kindly as I could, “I am not really interested in Hessians, Father Hesselman, or in the war which should be done with and drags on and on and on—and I asked you how you came up onto the Ridge by donkey seat, and you told me.”

He was a bit hurt and I suppose he felt somewhat rejected, and my wife looked at me accusingly; but the little man took heart from some clotted cream custard and good coffee and asked me, withal diffidently, in what I truly was interested.

“My immortal soul, if I have one.”

He reassured me.

“You’re a damn pleasant chap,” I told him, “and here I have done nothing but insult you and use my own bad manners to pin you up against your good nature.”

“Not at all,” he protested. “Not even the father of the prodigal son could have been more kindly, for you healed my wounds and comforted me and fed me food and will give me bed, so believe me, I pray for you in return for the love and kindness from you and your good lady.”

I woke the following morning half an hour before the sunrise and went looking for the priest. He was praying at the little fountain in the garden; and then we both sat there on the wooden bench and he heard my confession. With daylight, he was on his way, clutching a basket of bread and meat that Alice gave him, bouncing on the donkey’s back and undoing all the good I had done for those boils of his.

He came in and out of my life, for I never saw Father Hesselman again—yet in a way he was a catalyst for me, and through all the terrible business that followed, I could not get him and his foolish, gentle little smile out of my head. And, of course, he brought me news of the British frigate in the Sound.

It was out of that ship the Hessian detachment came, and why they had to make their way the fifteen miles up onto the Ridge, I will never know. If I could make this up as a story, it would be of one piece, but in its truth it is full of gaps, holes, questions asked and left unanswered. Like most of the folk on the Ridge, I pieced the tale together even though, as you will see, I was privy to more of it than anyone else, and some of it was of my own cause.

For one thing, it was I who insisted to Jenny Perkins, who was schoolteacher over at Ridgefield, that Saul Clamberham could learn. He had come into her school towering over the kids there, and while some of them knew him and realized that he was harmless, others were terrified of the great, oversized halfwit with his loose, slobbering speech.

I said, let him go to the school and sit in back and learn—I said that, when they brought the matter to me, as if Saul’s sickness were something I could diagnose and cure. “He wants to learn. It’s a human right. God gave us minds and put us on earth to learn. He’s not mindless, only addled, and what harm does he do if he sits quietly in back of the school?”

“My school?” Miss Perkins exclaimed.

“Not yours, not mine, Miss Perkins. A school is like a church, Miss Perkins. How can you lay claim to it?”

“I lay claim to the right to teach. How can I teach with Saul Clamberham there? He’s a grotesque. He’s a mindless idiot. Anyway, the children are afraid of him. Have they no rights? Is a school not for the children?”

Squire Abraham Hunt had come with her. What did I have against Squire Hunt, except my own petulance at the sort of a man he was? He was a commanding man, and I suppose I don’t like commanding men who know precisely what is right and what is wrong. He was a patriot and I was a soldier and a surgeon and a patriot only by the most objective of definitions. He made decisions and acted upon them, and I lived under the lurking suspicion that decisions—or at least most of them—were for God and not for men. His decision was that a physician should examine Saul Clamberham and bundle him off to the ma...