Jack Frake Page 2

  At home, his life in and around the cottage was centered on the chores of feeding the chickens and pigs, milking the cow and a pair of ewes, and acting as a human scarecrow in their field to chase away birds, weasels and other pests — which included many species of rodents and also poaching squatters — and the wandering flocks of sheep and herds of cattle of the more prosperous denizens of Trelowe. The Frake family was not prosperous. They scratched together a living by bartering milk and produce from their field with other farmers and cottagers, as their ancestors had done for generations. Coin was a welcome but infrequent guest in their household. There were no books or newspapers in the cottage, not even a Bible; the boy’s introduction to letters began with the labels on liquor bottles and the trademarks on farm and kitchen implements and would have ended there, but for the intervention of Parson Parmley. Play was a forgotten pastime; Jack Frake was put to work a few years after he had learned to walk. He had never seen a toy and would neither recognize one nor immediately grasp its function. Privacy was a luxury he had to steal from the time allotted to his chores. He would roam the meadows and surrounding villages near him only at the price of a beating or the denial of dinner, and usually both; it was a price he gladly suffered. His discovery of and frequent retreats to his cherished cubbyhole had cost him more bruises and hunger than he cared to remember.

  Cephas Frake inherited from his father the copyhold to a neat cottage and a productive half-acre of the commons. Lacking, though, both his father’s instinct for neighborliness and his knack for discreetly exploiting loopholes in England’s semi-feudal agricultural practices, he soon found himself working blindly and futilely against the tribulations of his time. He was industrious, and occasionally innovative, but as he spent no time reflecting on the possible causes of his interminable race with poverty, his industry and infrequent flickers of thought got him little. He was incapable of imagining any other way of life — except, perhaps, on a bountiful royal pension which would spare him all purpose and effort. But while Cephas Frake had a bottomless capacity for effort, he had no purpose, and there was no one to instruct him in the importance of their dual role in a man’s life. Sober, he was a boisterous, convivial drone in whose soul no solemn flame had ever burned. Drunk, he was a clamorous juggernaut, and either offensively familiar or violently morose, depending on whether he was celebrating a trite advantage or soaking his sorrows. So he pitched himself against the tribulations, cursed the necessity of his struggle, and remained blithely and gracelessly ingenuous, never to learn that the things he struggled against were meaner, crasser and more insensitive than he.

  Jack Frake was six when his father and mother began to offer food and drink outside their cottage to travelers who used the road that was a short-cut on the journey between Plymouth in Devon and Falmouth to the west, and to the west coast of Cornwall. His father even went to the trouble of painting a crude sign, picturing a crossed knife and fork over a glass, which he hung over the cottage door. Jack Frake was given the task of fetching fodder and water for the travelers’ mounts, and earned what was to him a fortune in pennies for sweating them down with a thick brush. Once, a carriage-and-four stopped at the cottage, and he saw for the first time a liveried coachman, a gentleman and a lady, and a boy his own age in silks, velvet and a white wig. The other boy did not speak to him, and stared at him with condescending curiosity. Jack Frake did not notice the condescension, but returned the stare with a critical glance of his own. He did not know where the people came from, nor where they went, but the family, the carriage, and the other boy were his first clues to another kind of existence, elsewhere.

  After two months, a county sheriff rode into the yard and threatened his father with the exorbitant fine of two guineas for operating an establishment without a victualler’s license. Cephas Frake was too much of a cynic to question the necessity of a license, and too dull-witted even to think of offering the sheriff a bribe. In peevish obedience, he found his ladder, took down the sign, and chopped it to pieces in front of the still-mounted, astonished sheriff. Then he lay down his ax, and stood facing the man, waiting. The sheriff frowned, uttered another warning, and rode away, his head shaking in time with the swish of his mount’s tail.

  Jack Frake was also astonished at his father’s behavior. Cephas Frake noticed the boy studying him. “There’s crows in our corn, boy!” he growled. “Wipe that look off your face and shoo ’em!”

  Two miserable years later, in the summer after the corn, beans and other crops had been sown and the wheat was beginning to come up, Cephas Frake grew more possessive of his common plot, and got into fights with villagers whose livestock trampled his garden. Then he had an idea. He would build a fence around his plot. Some of the village men had fences around their gardens. His would simply be bigger. When he told his wife his plan, she merely looked doubtful and shrugged. When he told his son, he was answered with a silent expression of awed respect, something new and unsettling to him. He was not certain that he cared for what the boy’s expression implied, but he playfully mussed the boy’s flaxen hair and said, “Let’s do it, boy.”

  Together they labored for days, hauling stones from the surrounding fields in a barrow, and erecting piles of them at intervals around the plot. They took longer trips together to collect driftwood from the beach and timbers from abandoned hovels, and used the wood to connect each pile to the next. And then they laughed together when, after the waist-high fence was finished, they stood at its gate to watch the sheep and cattle on the other side of the fence stand dumbly immobile at the obstacle in their path, and then shuffle away. “’Tis a thing of beauty, that fence,” remarked Cephas Frake with a chuckle.

  On his own, Cephas Frake had invented the practice of enclosure without ever having heard of the phenomenon, which was then imperceptibly changing the country’s rural landscape to the detriment of countless squatters, cottagers and marginal farmers, but to the advantage of the bustling manufacturing cities, which got more and better food. The commons was a major impediment to the spread of enclosure, a carcass of feudalism doomed ultimately to be removed.

  Too, he had never heard of socialism — no one then had — which was what the ‘commons’ was a form of, as it allowed villagers and cottagers like the Frakes equal rights to timber, grazing pasture, turf and fish in the land ringing a village. Villagers and farmers could erect fences around their gardens or small plots, but only by consensus. Cephas Frake had not asked anyone’s opinion, permission or advice concerning the enclosure of land which was not even nominally his, but the village’s.

  One afternoon, about a week after the fence was finished, the sheriff and the constable of Trelowe arrived at the cottage with a noisy mob of villagers, cottagers and squatters in tow. The sheriff, by His Majesty’s authority, directed the mob to dismantle the fence, and fined Frake a guinea and a half for “theft of commons land.”

  Cephas Frake was shocked, first by his lapse of memory, and then by the swiftness of the retribution. He removed his hat and stepped forward. “But it’s our food, sir,” he said, a note of meek apology in his words. He spoke in a loud, deferential voice, addressing not so much the sheriff as the mob, hoping it had some power over the sheriff. Some of the men in the mob fed their families with the produce that came from his plot. He assumed that this counted for something. “And it’s some of them men’s livestock that eat it, and what they don’t eat, they mash underfoot so we can’t.”

  “Granted,” said the sheriff. “But your offense is fivefold. You neglected to apply for commons leave to erect a fence or a hedge. You gleaned an excess of stone and wood beyond reasonable need, and so deprive your neighbors of their right to those materials. You raise turnips and clover without commons leave. You have assaulted or abused the persons of your neighbors for exercising their pasture rights. Finally, you enclose more than what has been deemed necessary by a committee of your peers for your own and the village’s sustenance. All these omissions and commissions constitute theft of land or th
eft of custom, in violation of the estovers of Trelowe. No formal litigation in court is necessary, as your guilt in these matters is beyond doubt and appeal. You are so charged, and so punished. It is as simple as that.” Without further word, he turned in his saddle and said to the mob, “Proceed.”

  Cephas Frake opened his mouth to protest again, but the sheriff had turned his mount and was riding across the yard to supervise the fence’s demolition.

  This time it was Frake and his wife who stood by dumbly as the villagers waded self-righteously into their task, and watched them knock down the stone piles and begin to build a bonfire of the wood in the middle of the garden. Jack Frake, however, was roused to a fury that transcended even that which he felt when his father belted him for neglecting his chores. He picked up a hoe and ran to attack the villagers who were building the bonfire. The villagers ducked the swings of his hoe, and laughed, not at him, but at Cephas Frake. But then the boy’s hoe struck one of the men in the head, leaving a gash under one ear. The constable rode up and whacked the boy on the side of the face with the flat of his short sword, knocking him down.

  “Do that again, young Frake,” said the constable to the boy as he lay on the ground, “and you and your worthless father will be charged with obstructing His Majesty’s justice, and to Newgate or Bristol you’ll both go!” He paused to smile maliciously at the anger in the boy’s eyes. “Or maybe it’s the army you’d like to march with? They’s always in need of drummer boys.”

  Neither Cephas Frake nor his wife moved to interfere. The boy got up and ran out of the field to the coast and his cubbyhole on the cliff.

  When he returned hours later, the garden was a ruin, the stones were strewn all over the commons, and smoke rose from the smoldering remains of the bonfire. His parents were inside the cottage, at the table, drinking mugs of gin. His father pushed a dirty tin of the liquid into his hands. “They took our tillin’ tools in lieu of the guinea and a half, boy. We’ll have to work the soil with an ax and a poker.” When the boy said nothing, Frake looked away from his scrutiny. There was something lurking in the boy’s stare that was antipodal to what he had seen days before. “Drink up, boy,” he muttered. “Gin’s the only shoulder we got to cry on.”

  His mother chuckled. “Have a swig of it, lad. It’ll put you to sleep and let you forget it all.”

  “Why didn’t you fight those men?” asked Jack Frake. He put down the tin.

  “What?” scoffed Cephas Frake. “And get killed or go to jail? What for?”

  “Your rights as an Englishman,” said Jack Frake, repeating a phrase he had heard some of the village men utter with reverence.

  “Hah! My rights! Stow it, boy! You’s talkin’ over your head!”

  “You got twenty guineas to spare us, Jack?” asked his mother with mockery. “If you got them, you can buy us some time at Inns Court and a barrister to boot!”

  “If they needed the stones and the wood, why did they burn the wood and just scatter the stones?”

  “Because we forgot our place, and that’s the law’s way of remindin’ us of it!” snarled his father. “Don’t harp on it, boy. It’s rattlin’ me. We done wrong, so we’s just got to live with it and leave it.”

  “They had no right to do that,” insisted the boy.

  “Yes, they did!” countered his father. “And you had no right to take a hoe to ’em! You struck a particular good friend of mine. You shamed me, and I’m ashamed of you. They’ll be talkin’ about me ’til the moon turns green!”

  “Why didn’t you try to stop them?” repeated the boy. “It was our fence!”

  “It weren’t our fence!” said Frake. “They’s was stones from the commons, and no one said we could use ’em that way or any way!”

  “You’re a coward,” blurted Jack Frake.

  His father turned and walloped him with a backhand that sent the boy clear across the room to tumble to the floor. “Don’t you tell me my nose!” shouted Cephas Frake, rising and shaking a finger at the boy as if it held a whip. “Any more sass from you, and your mother’s goin’ to have to plant you in the garden! You hear?”

  The boy did not reply, dared not reply. The look on his father’s face told him that he had touched something that lay immersed beneath the gin-warped anger: the will to murder. So he bit his lip and pushed himself back to rest against the woodbin, and glanced away, so that his father could not see the look on his own.

  Huldah Frake shrieked in laughter at the stunned look on her son’s face. “Serves you right for tryin’ to be the man your father ain’t either!”

  Cephas Frake whirled to his wife, then took a swipe at her, and another fight was on.

  The indignation the boy felt over the sheriff’s and villagers’ actions soured into implacable contempt for his parents. Not many days later he saw his father carousing drunkenly in the village with some of the men who had helped to destroy the fence. And as time went by, his father would be absent for long periods, returning with a bag of food or a few shillings in his pocket. The boy could not be sure, by listening from his pallet to his parents’ nocturnal conversations, whether his father was poaching on neighboring commons, or begging in other villages. Sometimes Cephas Frake would return with a face bruised or bloodied. And during these absences, the boy’s mother would send him away from his chores when local men stopped by. One of them, a man named Leith, a cousin of the constable of Trelowe, came more often than most. These stealthy visits resulted in more beatings for Jack Frake, now by his mother, to ensure the boy’s silence about her callers.

  Cephas Frake, despairing of feeding himself and his family, at last submitted to the ignominious alternative of going to the parish workhouse. With the connivance of the rector of St. Gwynn, he passed himself off to the parish union governor as a landless pauper. Robert Parmley, who preferred to have boys as pupils in his classroom than as wards of the workhouse laboring, in chains and fetters, over cloth, metal and wood, agreed to take the boy under tutelage three times a week, at no charge. And so Cephas Frake went to use his muscles in the tin mines, china-fields and slate quarries in the area, and Jack Frake suddenly found himself in school.

  That had been a year ago.

  None of his past was present in his mind now. His thoughts on the journey from St. Gwynn to his cubbyhole were simply the unconscious enjoyment of himself and his surroundings, each step and thought adding a fraction to the intricate calculation whose final answer was the moment. The moment had seized him and, for a while, wiped out all recollection of his past. He sensed, too, but only vaguely, that it was important for him to mark this moment, for when he next remembered it, it would be with happy, selfish reverence or with the bitter regret of loss, depending on the justice he earned for himself as a man. But to a boy of ten, the reality of manhood is eons into the future, and so the fleeting insight was shorter than a footnote. It did not govern the elated, excited peace he felt in himself, and with which, from the throne of his cubbyhole, without gesture or ceremony, he blessed himself and the world.

  Chapter 3: The Cubbyhole

  HIS CUBBYHOLE WAS A PUNCTURE IN THE SHEER DOWNWARD SWEEP OF granite to the beach two hundred feet below, vacated by material ejected millennia ago and since ground to sand by the surf. It was not visible from atop the cliff, and hardly noticeable from the Channel. Jack Frake discovered it one day when he plopped to his stomach at the edge to watch the fall of a stone he dropped from his hand. Its roof was the ground he lay on. There was no way into it but to shimmy over and drop to the edge of the demi-cave’s floor; no way out but to grip the edge of the roof and heave oneself up, taking care not to look down or to think of the space in back of or below one. Jack Frake wanted it, and claimed it, his single-minded greed overruling the paralyzing screams of fear in his mind and muscles as he mastered its ingress and egress that first time. After a while, he forgot the fear and felt that the hole was no more formidable than a fence.

  He had expected to find a bigger hole, perhaps even a giant cavern, but th
ere was just room enough for one sitting man, or one stooping boy. Sea gulls and other birds had built nests in it; he chucked them out and no more nests were built. When the wind was still, he could hear the tread of horses and the voices of passersby on the road that ran along the cliff side above. And sitting alone, his mind found the time to acquire perspective and horizon. The cubbyhole was a greater reprieve from his parents and the cottage than was his pallet of straw. There, in the darkness, the trials of the day and his mundane surroundings triggered an almost instant lapse into sleep; here, he could remain awake, and think, and dream, even though the hole was often dark or enclosed in damp, thick fog, and the pounding surf below was relentless in its effort to lull him into a mental haze as gray as the fog.

  Tonight, the wind was strong and blew against the cliff from the south. On it came a thick fog that erased the sea, the sky, and the sails. The coming of the fog was a sign that he should start home. He had never spent a night here; it was too cold even in the summer. This was April, and there was still a chance of snow. Jack Frake leaned forward and hugged his knees to stop them from shaking.