It was to be a long night.
There were others, too, fumbling down the frostbitten street; they throbbed forward like an ocean tide, like a school of fish compelled to sway wherever the current may take them. There was not a word, not a whisper; it dulled the senses, this dimness of light and sound and smell, made me inverted, only half-conscious of my darkening milieu. Sometimes people would brush against me, shapeless shadows in the peripheries of my vision, but they wouldn’t say anything and I wouldn’t say anything, either. It was like seeing everything through a watery film, that night.
Slowly, like something rising from beneath a dark liquid, the meeting house reared up before our collected eyes. It looked almost alive, unlit windows glaring, black clock beating like a muffled heart. I became aware of the crowd caving in on itself and dripping in through the gaping doors. We surrounded the edifice like a school of fish in a feeding ritual, gazing with unseeing eyes at a sinking corpse.
I was among the last to swim in through the open doorway and settle into the backcountry of the Old South Meeting House’s stone geography. Inside, it was louder—people at the front were squawking vehement patriotisms, and the din would ripple outward in swelling waves, degenerating from howls to whispers to thoughts. I would catch glimpses of high-strung diatribes, of elegant denunciations, as they floated down the crowd and out into the thick winter night. Sometimes they would sink into my hands, and I would admire them, beautiful and rigid and deadly.
A voice spoke, a loud voice, and our wandering mouths and wandering minds snapped into focus. Sam Adams speaks, murmured the fish in an imperceptible undertone—Sam Adams, Sam Adams, like a chant; and a deep silence washed over our bodies.
His voice rang; it rang with passion, and with eloquence, and it burned like fire in the cold air; it craved thought, and at the same time demanded attention; it was a poem, a spark of flame, a bloody wound, a bandage. Tea! he would cry, over and over and over again and the crowd would bubble like the innards of a hot kettle and echo Tea! with uniform intensity, and I, too, would drone indignantly as the swell of outcries found me in its exploration of the meeting house’s interior, though I knew little of the complexion of his speech, for I’d been eddied into a corner, and could hear little through the turbid silence.
Eventually Sam Adams’ speech took on a tone of entreaty; the crowd, being soaked in violent umbrage, and seeking a means to wring the zeal from their quivering bodies, began to simmer in excitement, so that the melodrama of the occasion fairly steamed from their gray skin. Every word the man poured from his lips, the crowd consumed, gurgled, swallowed; every gesticulation of his hands, the crowd would imitate fiercely; his meaning became half-lost in the fervor of their emulation.
But the men in the front—well-dressed fish, with stained neckties and bobbing top hats, threw off their clothes, save for some select undergarments, once the machinations of Adams’ scheme had been described. A gasp resonated backward as if a stone had been dropped in the stagnant pool of the meeting’s gravity, for we—I—had been hearing, but not listening; the meanings had been lost in the murky water that separated Adams from us, but the words’ empty shells had continued to swim even after their mortal strings had been cut. For what are words but mortal objects, to be lost and forgotten in the time?
I, too, slipped my coat and shirt from my body and let them drift heavily to the floor; upon this, I took to shivering, and throwing my arms across my bare, white chest, glanced about the room: some had followed the model of the men in front, or were in the process of doing so; some were looking about in stupid bewilderment; and most were contorting their faces in indignance or reluctance.
There was yelling, I think, and a great turbulence sprouted in the midst of the crowd. I found myself being churned in the direction of the door; chancing a glance back at Sam Adams, I saw him yelling frantically after us—the meeting wasn’t over. I felt sorry for him, almost, that social lightning rod, whose inflammatory character had betrayed him. But the school of fish kept wiggling along, and he soon passed out of sight, and the vast doors of the Old South Meeting House here hauled shut.
Some limbs and organs and arteries of the great mass we constituted were disguised as Indians—complexions mutilated with blotches of red and black paint, over the eyelids, over the hollow cheeks, over the chins and the lips and the ears. Some of these ringleaders of the crowd sprinted forward in clapping bare feet—disfiguring our amoebic form with eccentric tumors—and pierced the night with a dissonance of inhuman shrieks and hoots, which hung over our ears, ringing, and evaporated into the stars.
But all soon became silent and still, and there was only the splashing of feet over the cold, dry Boston road.
The Atlantic loomed wide and impenetrable before us, a mass of rippling blackness.
Drop the tea. Drop the tea.
It was a thought, the faintest of breaths, carried by an ancient ocean breeze that met us on its circumnavigation of the globe. It circulated between our shuffling feet, twisted itself into our ears, our minds; and we were of one purpose, one being.
Drop the tea. The tea.
I felt wood pawing at my naked toes, and realized that I was stepping onto a ship. There were ten or so here, resting their tired sails at the harbor. Three of them held the object of our hatred and our desire. The rest were warships.
The tea.
And the first splash met my ears.
I don’t remember much of those three long hours. It was tedious work, this lifting and throwing and shivering; at times I would forget what I was doing there, and sigh myself into listlessness, but the fish and Indians undulating from beneath their dark veil would whisper purpose into my soul and I would stand and work with newfound diligence. We toiled by the flickering light of our patriotism.
There was something otherworldly about that night, the steady pulse of tea chests beating like Indian drums against the seafloor, the friction of unclothed bodies against the wind, the smell of paint and mud and skin. We delved—each and all of us—into our own one-dimensional microcosms, that night—asleep, omnipresent. Sometimes we would speak to one another, but were answered only by a brusque nod of the head or a murmured syllable and then the silent infinity of night’s embrace.
Sometime toward the dawn, I think, a man next to me asked me what I thought of the whole affair. Would it make a point to the them? he asked, gesturing with a tilt of his painted countenance toward what I could only just make out as the warships.
It was more to make a point to myself, I told him, and he nodded let fall a chest of tea. We watched it drip down through the air, watched the fingers of the Atlantic grope upward and seize it, and it was gone.
I still remember that night, the night of the tea. It clouded my mind, became all I could think of, all I could care to discuss; everything else became trivial, and disgusting, and faded from me like fish from a winter stream. My wife diagnosed me as ill—indeed, I am still considered ill, and rarely do I ever see her anymore. She has gotten another husband, and another son, but I cannot bring myself to care for such things.
I have since learned that the ship I had boarded was called the Dartmouth.
Sam Adams, I hear, is out on the streets more than ever. I feel no resentment toward the man, nor remorse toward the deed I had—so long ago—committed under his command. Perhaps I will see him again; perhaps he has grown a beard, and is now old like myself; but then, perhaps I will not. After all, my room’s window is narrow, and is always pointed seaward.
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