My friends, the boys especially, were impressed and crowded round me to see it the better, imagining the watch and heavy chain, as I did, worn in a Colonial soldier’s waistcoat pocket by me, or someone sharply resembling me, as he marched heroically into the smoke and fury of Revolutionary battle.
At once, however, I realized that I had gone too far and now would have to swear the other children to secrecy. “Don’t say nothing to Mister Twichell about it,” I said. “My father was supposed to be the one who got Grandfather’s watch, and he don’t know yet that it’s gone to me, instead. Grandfather said he’d tell him today, while I’m off the place.”
I was betrayed, of course. Not by one of the children, though. By Mr. Twichell himself, who had stood at the doorway and had observed my little performance from across the schoolyard. When I passed by the schoolmaster and entered the building with my armload of firewood, he tapped me lightly on the shoulder, smiled down, and said, “Owen, when you have put the wood in the box, come and show me what you were showing the children.”
I did as instructed, and he took the timepiece and turned it over, examining the initials and the fine face with the Roman numerals. “How did you come by this?” he gently asked.
I looked around and saw that all the children were watching, waiting for me to reveal my lie, for at bottom they had known the truth, or at least had known that I was lying, and now I was about to be exposed in public, not just as a liar, but as a thief as well. I hesitated a second, and Mr. Twichell said again, “How did you come by such a marvelous instrument, Owen?”
I sucked in my breath and quickly repeated the lie that I had told the children outside.
He gazed at the watch for a few seconds, admiring it, and when he handed it back to me, asked if I could read the time from the markings on its face. I nodded yes, and he asked me how I knew which was which, for they weren’t numbers, were they? They were X’s and V’s and Vs.
“They’re in the same place as the regular numbers,” I said.
He said that was so, and then told us to take out our slates and begin the day’s lesson, which turned out to be — fortuitously, he said, winking broadly at me — upon the difference between Roman and Arabic numerals. In a surprisingly short time, every child in the room could write in Roman any date the teacher called out to us and any hour, the number of the states in 1776 and the number today in 1833, the white population of the United States, the Negro population of the United States, the total of the two, and the difference between.
At day’s end, when I passed out of the schoolhouse, Mr. Twichell stopped me at the doorway and handed me a small, folded sheet of paper. “I’m sorry, Owen,”he said, in a voice so soft that only I could hear it. ‘This is for your father. Please, don’t fail to deliver it to him.” I took the note with trembling hand, for I knew what it said, and slipped it into my trouser pocket, next to Grandfather’s watch. “You may read it if you wish;’ Mr. Twichell added. He seemed sad and guilty, almost, and I knew why. But he had done the right thing. I was the sinner, not he.
I did not read the note; I could not. I did not deserve to. Dutifully, when I arrived home, I went straight to Father, who was at work inside the tannery, and passed the note to him. He slowly unfolded the paper and read it. Finally, without a word, he held out his hand before me, and I drew the watch from my pocket and laid it flat in his huge, callused, outstretched hand. He thanked me, turned to Grandfather, who had been seated on a stool next to the fire, watching, and gave it over to him. Carefully, Grandfather examined the watch, as if checking it for damage, and placed it into his vest pocket. Then he took up his walking stick, rose creakily, and walked from the room to the yard, where my brothers were at work.
Father said, “Is there anything you can say in your defense, Owen?” His face was very sad and downcast, like Mr. Twichell’s.
“No.”
He sighed. “I thought not. Come with me,” he said.
We went to the barn, where it was dark. Motes of hay drifted slowly from the lofts through beams of light shining through the cracks and openings above. He told me to remove my shirt, which I did, while behind me and out of sight he took from its nail on the main post of the barn the hated piece of cowhide which, years ago, long before my birth, he had tanned and cut into a long strip strictly for the purpose of chastizing his children. I bowed my head and waited, shivering, for the first blow against the cold skin of my bare back.
And when the blow came, the force of it sent my breath from my body, and before I could inhale, the second blow came, harder than the first. Twelve times he lashed my back, one for each hour on the face of the watch, he told me, as he swung the leather strap again and again, each stroke shoving me nearly off my feet. Twelve strokes, he said, so that I would forever associate this particular punishment with my lie. “Twelve strokes for telling people that you owned what was owned by another. For lying.” Each stroke drove me a step forward — twelve steps in a circle in the dirt floor of the barn.
Finally, he stopped. I had not wept and was surprised by that and wondered if somehow, due to my sinful nature, I had lost the capacity for it. Father said, “There are also sixty minutes on the face of a watch, Owen. And not only did you lie, you stole. You coveted your grandfather’s property and stole it from him.” To my amazement, then, Father turned me around to face him and handed me the leather strap and stripped off his own shirt. “As much as you’ve failed me as a son, I’ve failed you as a father,” he said, and he got down on his knees before me. “We’re connected, our sins are connected, in the same way as the sixty minutes and the twelve hours on the face of Grandfather’s watch are connected. Therefore, you must place sixty lashes on my back. Then you’ll never forget how we, you and I, and Grandfather, too, all of us, are connected in all our thoughts and deeds.”
Bewildered at first and frightened by his command, I nonetheless did as I was told and struck him across his naked back with the leather, his own whip of chastizement. It was a feeble blow, but it was all I could muster. “Harder!” he instructed, and I obeyed. “Harder still!” he commanded, and so I did, again and again, growing stronger with each blow, until I had lashed him all sixty times. And then, at the sixtieth and final blow, at last I began weeping copious tears.
“Now, Owen, now you see how it is between God and man,” Father said to me. “Now you’re weeping. And when the Bible says, ‘Jesus wept,’ you know why He wept. Don’t you?”
I could not answer.
“Don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I understand now.” And I put my shirt back on and left him there alone in the dim light of the barn, praying quietly to God for forgiveness.
I will tell you another story of our life then and of early deceit and punishment, one that, like the other, will bear significantly on later events. More so than any of our neighbors, wherever we lived, we Browns kept the Sabbath holy. Defined precisely, in the way of Father’s literal ancestors, the old New England Puritans, and of his spiritual forebears, the ancient Hebrews, our Sabbath began on Saturday night at sundown and ended at sundown the following day. Father brooked no variations or exceptions to this rule. Sometimes we children argued with him as to whether the Saturday sun had actually set yet, for there was still light filtering through the trees from the west, and John or Jason might contend that if the trees behind the house had been cut, then there would be at least another half-hour of daylight, so it was not truly sunset. But Father would have none of that, answering, “Yes, John, and I suppose if the western hills were not there, we’d have fully an hour of daylight left. Come in now, boys, and honor the Lord with your silence.”