The Trouble with Tom Read Online Free
Author: Paul Collins
without vomiting it up again. Even Jarvis, now at the top of his game as an artist, took time off from working in his grand studio at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway to visit his old friend. Gladdened by the sight of the dashing painter, Paine would turn over onto his sideâgasping "Oh! God.! Oh. . . God." as he rolled upon his soresâand then, regaining his composure, confide in Jarvis. He had been getting harassed constantly by people trying to convert him, he said: ministers were stopping by every day now, angling for a recantation. Even the nurse, Mrs. Heddon, would wait until he was helpless with pain and then pounce upon him with the Bible and Hobart's Companion for the Altar .
I recant nothing , he told Jarvis.
The next morning, warned by his physician Dr. Manleyâ you are about to die, dissolution is upon you this very dary âPaine refused yet again to accept Christ. The doctor pressed him one last time.
"Do you wish to believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God?" he demanded.
There was a long pause of minutes. Perhaps the patient really had died. But Paine's lips moved: words, weak but distinct.
"I have no wish to believe on that subject."
And then . . .
Then . . .
He should have been dead from the start. He'd been cheating Death almost from the beginning: at the age of nineteen, leaving his parents' home for the first time, Pain-he'd not yet added the final e to his nameâset out for London and was recruited at dockside for service on a privateer ship called the Terrible , commanded by one Captain Death. Thomas's father showed up on the docks in time to save him from what was either a very good allegory or a very bad Ingmar Bergman film. The Terrible sailed without Pain, and Captain Death and the crew were slaughtered. And there is something curiously familiar in that account, isn't there? For we all nearly board a Terrible we all look back in relief that we did not. We always slip free of Captain Death one more time . . . until, of course, we don't.
He should have been dead halfway into his life. It was in Philadelphia, on November 30, 1774, that the London Packet disgorged a nondescript passenger half-dead with typhoid. Pain was by then a middle-aged failure: the son of a Quaker family of corsetmakers in Thetford had left England a disgraced customs officer and a bankrupt shopkeeper. He was recently divorced from his second wife, having already lost his first wife and only child in childbirth. And after watching five other dead passengers dumped over the ship's side on the way over, it's a wonder Pain didn't throw himself overboard as well. But among his meager belongings was found a letter to Richard Bache, a prominent local merchant:
The bearer Mr. Thomas Pain is very well recommended to me as an ingenious worthy young man. He goes to Pennsylvania with a view of settling there. I request you to give him your best advice and countenance, as he is quite a stranger there. If you can put him in a way of obtaining employment as a clerk, or assistant tutor in a school, or assistant surveyor, of all of which I think him very capable, so that he may procure a subsistence at least, till he can make acquaintance and obtain a knowledge of the country, you will do well, and much oblige your affectionate father.
It proved to be the best introduction to Philadelphia one could imagine, for Bache's "affectionate father" was in fact a stepfather with a different name altogether, a gentleman scientist and merchant who had noticed Pain's argumentative and restless brilliance in London coffeehouses: â Benj. Franklin â read the signature.
How many times must progress be born, struck dead, and reborn again, before it finally survives? It was, after all, not the first time Franklin had been intrigued by the fiery zeal of a fellow Quaker. Decades earlier he'd befriended Benjamin Lay, a hunchbacked glovemaker disowned by English Quakers for denouncing slavery and capital punishment as
I recant nothing , he told Jarvis.
The next morning, warned by his physician Dr. Manleyâ you are about to die, dissolution is upon you this very dary âPaine refused yet again to accept Christ. The doctor pressed him one last time.
"Do you wish to believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God?" he demanded.
There was a long pause of minutes. Perhaps the patient really had died. But Paine's lips moved: words, weak but distinct.
"I have no wish to believe on that subject."
And then . . .
Then . . .
He should have been dead from the start. He'd been cheating Death almost from the beginning: at the age of nineteen, leaving his parents' home for the first time, Pain-he'd not yet added the final e to his nameâset out for London and was recruited at dockside for service on a privateer ship called the Terrible , commanded by one Captain Death. Thomas's father showed up on the docks in time to save him from what was either a very good allegory or a very bad Ingmar Bergman film. The Terrible sailed without Pain, and Captain Death and the crew were slaughtered. And there is something curiously familiar in that account, isn't there? For we all nearly board a Terrible we all look back in relief that we did not. We always slip free of Captain Death one more time . . . until, of course, we don't.
He should have been dead halfway into his life. It was in Philadelphia, on November 30, 1774, that the London Packet disgorged a nondescript passenger half-dead with typhoid. Pain was by then a middle-aged failure: the son of a Quaker family of corsetmakers in Thetford had left England a disgraced customs officer and a bankrupt shopkeeper. He was recently divorced from his second wife, having already lost his first wife and only child in childbirth. And after watching five other dead passengers dumped over the ship's side on the way over, it's a wonder Pain didn't throw himself overboard as well. But among his meager belongings was found a letter to Richard Bache, a prominent local merchant:
The bearer Mr. Thomas Pain is very well recommended to me as an ingenious worthy young man. He goes to Pennsylvania with a view of settling there. I request you to give him your best advice and countenance, as he is quite a stranger there. If you can put him in a way of obtaining employment as a clerk, or assistant tutor in a school, or assistant surveyor, of all of which I think him very capable, so that he may procure a subsistence at least, till he can make acquaintance and obtain a knowledge of the country, you will do well, and much oblige your affectionate father.
It proved to be the best introduction to Philadelphia one could imagine, for Bache's "affectionate father" was in fact a stepfather with a different name altogether, a gentleman scientist and merchant who had noticed Pain's argumentative and restless brilliance in London coffeehouses: â Benj. Franklin â read the signature.
How many times must progress be born, struck dead, and reborn again, before it finally survives? It was, after all, not the first time Franklin had been intrigued by the fiery zeal of a fellow Quaker. Decades earlier he'd befriended Benjamin Lay, a hunchbacked glovemaker disowned by English Quakers for denouncing slavery and capital punishment as
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