Bobby Roy

Bobby Roy

       Dougmare Rimlass

Bobby Roy, the Boston Tea Party, Daniel Boone, Morley Callaghan, Woody Guthro, Robert Frost, Robin Hood, Wetzel, the gunpowder plot, Billy the Kid, the Highwayman, Wallace Stegner, Dostoevsky, William of Orange, Earl of Sussex, Christopher Marlowe, Moby Dick, and Count Dracula all had something in common and I’ll tell you what that was at the end of this story. I am employed at Revenue Canada. I recently applied for and got an interview to work there as a C2 on actual tax files. And then I was hired, and now I am employed by the government. I feel lucky that I did not end up in the mailroom since that would alert everyone to what they would consider to be my relative intelligence and I prefer none to speculate too precisely on that matter.   

        The other day I was thinking about characters I had met in my readings since I was a boy and I’ll tell you about them. Bob Roy, a Scot, defended a northern Scottish king from the British around seventeen hundred in an important battle and almost succeeded thereby in keeping his head. He had first, however, before coming to King Jeffrey’s rescue, spent many years antagonizing the regent by hunting in his forests without leave, courting his daughters, sodomizing his sons, nephews, stable boys and priests and generally depleting the revenues of the rich who lived in towns and villages in the vicinity of the castle. Oh! was he hated by the king and his officials! They set traps for him, they lured him with scantily clad maidens, and they once succeeded in briefly capturing him by sending an army to an outpost in the wilds with bags of money ostensibly to pay for the acquirement of weapons for the king’s armory. But Bob eluded them until this one hour when the King’s need was dire. The renegade took his merry men into the fray, saved the day, routed the enemy, and despite many instances of personal heroism, found himself dangling at the end of a rope when the King’s reign had once again been assured and his authority reasserted.

       About the Boston tea party I am on slightly less certain ground. On a rainy day in late November in 1793 a group of Bostonians decided that the British needed to learn a lesson. This New World was no longer to be considered British or even a British colony. They snuck aboard the Quequod, a  British ship anchored in Boston, and threw overboard into the harbor everything they could find that did not fit into their pockets. Mainly they dumped tea, which was the ship’s (and the Queen’s) essential cargo though it had secreted in its hold also rum, wine, slaves, cotton, Spanish coinage of high values (doubloons, pieces-of-eight, siver dollars), mapping equiptments, and various huge chests of beads and hatchet heads.

       After the revolutionaries sank the tea near where, if I am correct, the Tallahasseee River enters the harbor, they fled. They were led by the fearless Paul Riviere of whose fame I am sure you have heard and whose wife was shortly thereafter impregnated by Henry Willinger, the consul from Britain recently arrived in America from his residence in London for a brief set of meetings concerning, ironically, the state of relations between the two nations. The impregnation happened on the banks of the Susquehanna where it empties into the Tallahassee and is lined and limned just there with the most spectacular grove of cluster birches I have ever encountered in my travels. He took her there, while her husband was hiding from the law (home was obviously the last place Paul would go), on the pretext of attempting to win over her opinion in order to influence her spouse. She liked what she saw, plied him with local vintage, lifted her dress over her hips as she lay on a blanket in grass deep enough to screen their activities from accidental observation by passing Hurons, rocked her pelvis in a shocking and mesmerizing fashion, slid her fingers in and out of her mouth twice, and then mounted him when he threw himself down on the lawnage beside her. “Paul,” she is reputed to have whispered at some point in the proceedings, “spends too much time with his horse. He’s a regular Sir Topas!”

       Daniel Boone lived in what was then still called the Virginias and is now known as the United States of America. This was about 1650 or so. He fought against aboriginal bands that otherwise would have laid the new colonies to waste which, while not thriving yet, nevertheless already showed signs of great things to come. Without Boone these hatchling states would have died in their infancy. One of the stories attached to Boone’s long career as protector of the colonists is that of how he exchanged clothing with a milkmaid and snuck disguised through enemy lines to bring a message to General Montcalm whose whole army stood to have been slaughtered in the dark had it not been for his timely warning that the fearsome Iroquois had banded together with the Huron and intended that very night to burn the fort while Montcalm’s men slept. The gravest danger to Montcalm lay in the fact that the aboriginals had for help some turncoat soldiers inside the fort who intended to open the gates at the right time and let the mauraders in.

(To be continued.)