Citizen Tom Paine Read Free Page B

Paine came back to renew his promise on the debt, and Kearsley said, “Forget about it. I won twenty pounds on you.”
    â€œI heard about that,” Paine admitted, without anger.
    â€œI don’t say you’re not worth more,” the doctor temporized. “I don’t know what a man’s worth. I hear you are teaching.”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œI hope you do well at it,” the doctor said, sincere this time.
    Paine shrugged; a shilling a day was enough, and two shillings more than enough, and when Mrs. Cradle gave him her husband’s third best pair of breeches, he took it. He didn’t work hard, and there were whole days when he did nothing at all but wander around Philadelphia, almost childishly intrigued by the colorful, un-European pageant that passed along the streets. There were red Indians out of the wooded mountains, wrapped in their bright and dirty blankets, clay pipes clenched in their teeth; there were wooden-shoed Dutchmen down on their flatboats from the Jerseys, sharp-nosed Yankees from Boston, tall Swedes from the Delaware country, dirty leather-coated hunters from the back counties, carrying their six-foot-long rifles wherever they went, silk-and-satin Tidewater gentlemen up from the south with their slaves, black and white and red and brown, and gray-clad Quakers of the inner circle, Penns and Darleys and Rodmonts. Up First Street, down Spruce, round about the Square, along Broad, he could walk slowly and lazily, divorced from the world in a murky way, his past severed, his future non-existent, a shilling teacher, the butt of smutty stories, his home sometimes a room in one tavern and sometimes in another if the weather was bad, if it snowed and rained and the wind lashed; but if the day was good enough he wasn’t averse to bedding into a pile of hay in some Quaker’s stable, thereby saving sixpence, which was about the price of the cheapest room a tavern sold.
    If he thought of himself at all, it was with pity; when he could afford a bottle of wine it went down in such self-sympathy that he would usually wind up a mass of maudlin tears. And he didn’t have to drink alone, since there was usually a tavern drunk to keep him company. Look at his own life, he would point out. Had he a chance? Staymaker when he was still a boy, finding a woman he loved and then losing her, grinding through what lower-middle-class England called life, drunk two weeks, a month on bad gin, the whole world like a fluttering pinwheel, groping in a haze for a little beauty, himself ugly and raw and unkempt.
    He wasn’t a fool; often he told himself, passively, that the mere fact he had wanted so many things proved it; and never acceptance, since he had hated with such ferocity kings, noblemen, ladies and gentlemen of quality, beggars and thieves and fat, prosperous merchants, sluts and whores and decent women too—and whom had he loved?
    There was once a woman he loved, he knew.
    Now he didn’t love and he didn’t hate; he had accomplished one great thing, his passage to the thin fringe of colonies on the American mainland; thereupon he rested. No one gave him shoes, and his shoes wore out; his stockings were a blunt deception; he had been given an old coat that flapped threadbare about his shoulders, and he meandered through the streets with his head down against the cold blasts of wind, his appearance unusual enough for people to begin to know him in such a small city as Philadelphia was then.
    â€œThere goes Tom Paine,” they said.
    A committee of Quaker ladies called on him. They brought him a new coat and a vest. “Thee are a shame to us,” they pointed out. “Thee will go on this way until God will turn away his face.”
    He had been drinking, and he said, smiling foolishly, “I lick God’s belly.”
    That got around the city, and he lost half his tutoring jobs.
    That month, January, in the year 1775, was the beginning