Citizen Tom Paine by Howard Fast Page B

Rumpels were a new and wonderful experience. There was nothing like them in England, and he was sure there was nothing quite like them anywhere else in the world. In wealth and possessions they were richer than many a squire at home, yet Jacob Rumpel worked with his hands and Hester Rumpel, his wife, did the cooking for the whole huge family. They were not peasants, yet they could not be put in the class of the English yeomen farmers. Their hired man sat down with them at the table as an equal, not as a servant, and the children shared in the chores as if they took pleasure in the mere act of labor.
    Jacob Rumpel plowed his own fields, yet at night he read not only the Pennsylvania Magazine but Voltaire and Defoe. His wit was the wit of Poor Richard; Ben Franklin was his god and the greatest intellectual influence upon his life; and he could only philosophize in terms of action. He made his own candles, his own soap, his own cloth for which he raised his own flax and wool. The farm was his, but a younger brother had packed his possessions in a wagon and gone west into the lonely hills of Fincastle, and Rumpel took it for granted that some of his sons would do the same. His wife came of Puritan stock, but he himself was comfortably agnostic, not out of reason, but rather out of unbounded confidence in things that are. He and God walked the earth on even terms; he did what was right, and he was content with his doubts. He hated slave-holders, and he drank no tea out of principle, but his admiration for the Boston men, whom he considered in other ways a bloodless and intolerant breed, would not be translated into action until the redcoats marched on Pennsylvania soil. When Paine asked him what he would do then, he said, matter of factly, “Take my gun.”
    â€œAnd the farm?”
    â€œI reckon the farm’ll limp along.”
    But after he had gone back to the farm half a dozen times, welcomed by Rumpel who was just naive enough to consider Paine a great figure in the intellectual life of Philadelphia, a favorite with the children to whom he told endless stories of highwaymen and privateers, Paine no longer denied to himself what brought him there so constantly. He was not in love with Sarah, not as love goes; inside he was dry and empty, and the memory of the serving girl who died in the shack in Margate hung like a stone around his neck.
    But being with Sarah was compounded of peace and rest-fulness, and a content such as he had not known before. Indolence was something very new to him; unemployment he knew and starvation he knew, just as he knew poverty and drunkenness and squalor and all the shambling wrecks who did nothing because there was nothing for them to do. But the pleasure of sheer laziness, the sweet satisfaction of dawdling in a Pennsylvania summertime was as strange for him as was this curious family in their stone house with its foot-thick walls.
    He would sit in the barnyard and watch the girl, or else in the kitchen where he told endless stories both to the children and Hester Rumpel. He found in himself a gift for a mild sort of fun-making; he found he could say things that would make them laugh. And as often as he could, he would help Sarah. That was difficult, for her own strength was a very matter-of-fact thing, while few people realized the layers of broad peasant muscle in Tom Paine’s sloping shoulders. But in carrying buckets of water or sacks of feed, he was permitted to have his own way now and again, and it gave him a strange pleasure when his strength dragged from her a grudging smile of admiration.
    She spoke little, as if taking it for granted that he knew how much she could convey with a smile and a word, or simply with a movement of her fair head. When Paine confided to her the work he was doing, he half doubted whether she understood more than a part of it.
    â€œI’m writing a small book to make things clear,” he said once.
    â€œYou mean the Boston