The Trouble with Tom Read Online Free PDF

was the dreary Partition Street boardinghouse where Paine finally stopped writing-it's called Fulton Street now. And his room in Jarvis's studio was a couple of blocks in the other direction, looking directly across the street into what was once the World Trade Center.
    I stop at the corner of Wall and Water streets, by the endless print churn of a Kinko's shop: this is where the newspaper instructed me to go. I fish the New-York Herald out from my backpack, its pages browned by the passage of two centuries. It flutters slightly in the breeze off the looming buildings:
    FOR SALE, at public auction, at the Tontine Coffee House in the city of New-York . . . an excellent FARM, situated in the town of New Rochelle, in the county of Westchester, and late the property of Thomas Paine, dec. containing about 84 acres . . . The terms of sale are one half cash; the remainder to be secured by mortgage on the premises An indisputable title will be given to the purchasers by the Executors of Mr. Paine.
    Granted, the auction gets far less space than an entire column on the same page devoted to the felicities of Dr. Robertson's Vegetable Nervous Cordial, but it is more than most New York papers bothered to say about Paine himself when he died. Most had little to say except to tartly note that he had done "some good and much harm." The man they had no use for; his plot of dirt upstate, at least, was worth something. A buyer coming here to the coffeehouse that afternoon would have found the place a bustle of transactions, as it always was: the Tontine was the precursor to the Stock Exchange, and in its three floors of cigar smoke and bidding, you could make political deals, pick up mail off-loaded from newly arrived London ships, and buy entire cargos of pelts or lumber. But if you bid in that auction for the property of the late Thomas Paine, you got just a little more than you'd bargained for—something they had rather conveniently forgotten to mention in the ad. For along with his land, you also got . . . Thomas Paine.
    It was a sad tale to relate. After Jarvis made one last pilgrimage to his friend's deathbed, this time to make a plaster death mask of Paine, he bitterly drew a caricature of Manhattan's ministers stomping on the dead body while a Quaker turns his back and walks away with a shovel, muttering, "I'll not bury thee." The young men who had once shunned Benjamin Lay were now old men who turned their backs on Thomas Paine. But a quietly defiant Willet Hicks, at least, had come to Paine's aid. Hicks rode with the corpse as it was hauled up to the farm in New Rochelle; and there, not far from Paine's cottage, he officiated at a burial in the unconsecrated corner of a field.
    A taxi passes me with a familiar image affixed to its roof-an ad with Ben Franklin's face staring out from a hundred-dollar bill. The old mentor, staring past the vanished remains of his wayward protege.
    There were twenty thousand mourners at Franklin's funeral. Tom Paine's had six. And while Franklin's grave became a place of pilgrimage, Paine's attracted a different sort of attention. Pious locals in New Rochelle would make sure to pelt his headstone with rocks whenever they passed: others kicked at the leaning stone, or chipped off pieces as souvenirs. It all became too much for Paine's old neighbor Charity Badeau, who ran a tavern across the street; exasperated by the desecrations, she saved the few remaining pieces of the stone by mortaring them into the wall of her establishment. Even these still had small nuggets pried out of them. Few gave much thought to the dead fellow now buried in an unmarked grave in the weeds, save for the local drunks idly flaking chips off Mrs. Badeau's wall with their penknives. Years passed: his memory faded.
    But in the dead of night in October 1819, Badeau's son Albert thought he heard something outside their tavern. He peered out his window and into the darkness. It was hard to make out, but across the road there