Free Citizen Tom Paine by Howard Fast Page B

bitterness went out of her, and she whimpered and fretted like a hurt child. He didn’t eat, and one by one sold his precious tools to give her cream and fowl and now and then a piece of beefsteak with pudding; half starved, he could think of only one thing, to keep a roof over her head, a fire in the grate, and a little food in the pot. His trade, what there was of it, barely paid the rent, and his efforts to obtain other necessities became a sort of frenzy. He remembered Gin Row, put a patch over one eye, bound and twisted a limb, and begged through the streets. He was sure a leech could help his wife, and finally, with many threats and coaxings, got one to come to the shop for a shilling.
    â€œFestering fever,” the leech said, while Mary looked at him, wide-eyed and frightened.
    â€œWhat can you do?” Paine asked him, afterward and away from the bed.
    â€œOne performs and expects a certain amount of bloodletting,” the doctor remarked. “Docendo discimus of the evil vapors, the spirits that distend her veins. Haud longis intervallis the blood must flow—”
    Paine shook his head wearily. “I don’t have Latin.”
    â€œAh, but medical terms, medical trade, medical mystery. Keep doors and windows close locked. When sickness comes, the devils dance like noxies.…”
    That night she said, “Tommy, Tommy, I’m going for to die—”
    â€œNo, no, the doctor said you would be all right.”
    All her spleen was gone, and she held onto his hand as if it was the last real thing on earth. And that night, white and wax-like from all the bleeding, she closed her eyes and turned her face away from Paine.
    He sat all the next day, wide-eyed, silent, while the curious thronged the house, while the neighbors who had never taken any notice of them, poured in and out. He had no grief now, only a blazing anger that would burn within him forever.
    West of the town of Philadelphia lay a green and rolling meadow called the Commons, and there Tom Paine made his way to watch the militia drill. He had thought of a mob before coming to the meadow on this placid, sunny spring afternoon, but this he saw was no mob. Neither was it an army, even in promise; neither was it anything the world had ever seen before, this group of men and boys, apprentices, journeymen, masters, clerks and students, smiths and millers, carpenters, weavers, barbers, printers, potters, men in aprons with the stain of their trade on their hands. These were the citizens of Philadelphia, yet not all the citizenry. The distinction eluded him, though it was there. Not that they were workingmen all, for there were masters and rich men as well as those who worked for hire; there was one banker, two mercers, a journalist, Tom Jaffers, who was rich enough to do nothing at all, three pastors, a grain speculator, and a fur buyer, to add to those who worked with their hands. There were Quakers, who were pacifists, Methodists, Puritans, Baptists, Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Jews, Congregationalists, Dissenters, Diests, Agnostics, and Atheists. There were free blacks along with the whites, Negro slaves along with their masters.
    What moved them? Paine wondered. What distinguished them? What had brought them together?
    Slowly, he walked around the field, his heart racing with excitement, apprehension, fear too, withal a hopefulness he had never known before. He watched them drill with their own weapons, this awkward, stumbling, self-conscious first citizen army the world had ever known; firelocks they bore, great old muskets, bell-mouthed matchlocks that had come into the country more than a century ago, a few long, graceful rifles from the back counties, halberds, axes, pikes, cutlasses, rapiers, two-handed museum-piece swords, and those who had no weapon, not even a horse pistol, just sticks which they carried with dead seriousness. Some of them, those who had a shilling to spend strutting, already had uniforms,