Cavalier Famous Quotes

She asked me if we had any more of the peaches we’d bought in Arkansas. We got peaches galore, I said. The car was fragrant with the bushels of fruit we’d been wolfing for two days while our bowels grumbled. I picked through the soft bottom peaches for an unbruised one to hand her. I asked, Wasn’t that the name of some famous stripper, Peaches Galore? Pussy Galore, I believe, Mother said. She bit the peach with a zeal that made me cringe, as did her cavalier use of the word pussy, though I myself used it with alacrity. To look at her behind the wheel, with the mess she could make of a peach, appalled me. She was so primordial. She had to wipe the juice off her chin with the back of her hand.

The royalists or Cavaliers, wore their hair long. They sported dashing beards and mustaches. Their costumes were lavish and romantic. Large codpieces were the fashion equivalent of the tight pants and bulge brigades of 1970s rock. The royalists were unrepentant drunks and fornicators, but they were also students of philosophy, inspired by all cultures of history, not only Christian. Their experiments in alchemy and astrology evolved into modern chemistry and astronomy. Their opposition, the Puritans, were a younger generation rebelling in every way against their fathers, whom they considered irresponsible, reprehensible, and downright pagan. The Puritans were sober. They forbade dancing. Laughter was not allowed. And they couldn’t run or walk too fast, only proceed at a measured pace. In May 1627 Tom decided to celebrate May Day with the locals. There would be food, drink, a maypole, music, dancing, and hopefully wenching; everyone was invited including Indigenous men and women, a guest list that scandalized the Pilgrims. Imagine a round green hill that overlooked the Atlantic Ocean. Red gooseberry flowers and white dogwood blossoms decorated the forest bright under the May sun. Indigenous people and Europeans alike helped prepare and raise the maypole. Stripped of bark, the eighty-foottall yellow pine practically glowed, decorated with multicolored ribbons flowing in the breeze. A noble set of antlers crowned the top. They served beer they had brewed from their own hops, and they marched with guns and drums in a parade that faintly echoed the cavalry procession at Queen Elizabeth’s Christmas gala that Tom had seen as a child so long ago. Tom and his men composed The Poem. Not quite a manifesto, he read it aloud then nailed it to the maypole. Tom must have had to explain the ancient Greek myths he referenced. The widow he loved and left back home in England must still have been on his mind, as were Indigenous widows, who were often seen weeping over the graves of their lost loved ones. When Tom begins The Poem by calling on Oedipus, he’s asking the famous solver of the riddle of the Sphinx to solve Tom’s riddle. But Tom also knew that Oedipus had cured the plague that was destroying ancient Thebes, so The Poem was asking for a healing of the plague-devastated New World.