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.