Odd Cod

JOHN GOFFE'S LEGACY (272 pp.)--George Woodbury--Norton ($3.50).

This is a delightful chimney-corner tale of old New England and especially of the hardy, hearty line of Goffes who, for 200 years, have lived beside the moving waters of the family mill at Bedford, N.H., near Manchester. The first Goffe to reach the

New World was William, a major genera! of Oliver Cromwell's England and one oi the 63 judges who condemned King Charles I to death. After the Restoration he fled to the American wilderness, where for decades he was a fugitive from the vengeance of Charles II. With his steeple hat, his flowing white beard, his Bible and his sword, William Goffe became a New England legend (Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of him as The Gray Champion}. Years after his death, the shade of William Goffe reportedly appeared at Bunker Hill, and, later, before John Brown in the engine house at Harper's Ferry.

William's descendants were cast from the same stern mold. His great-grandson, Colonel John Goffe, was a noted Indian fighter. The colonel's son John, in turn, was as robust as his forefathers. Accidentally caught in the heavy mill machinery one day, he was "squoaze so bad" that he never fully recovered and died some years later at what--for a Goffe--was the untimely age of 86.

Uncle Ody, who died in 1860, the last to bear the name of Goffe, was a cantankerous man who objected strenuously to churchgoing, though he was tolerably religious. But public opinion demanded his appearance in church each Sunday, until Ody solved the problem thus: "One day he walked to Boston. It was 60 miles, but walking was cheaper than using up a good horse. When he returned, he announced to the astonished neighbors that he had joined the Roman Catholic Church, and since there was no church of that denomination any nearer, he could stay at home Sundays from now on." Other members of the family adapted themselves to the manners and morals of the day with equal resourcefulness. Cousin John Rand, a fashionable Victorian portrait painter and the inventor of the collapsible paint tube, was a fine figure of a man. "He stood an even six feet, four inches; his wife did not quite reach five feet. Fashion decreed that the lady should always take the gentleman's arm, but alas, his was too high to reach. He had to carry a looped handkerchief on his elbow on which she could rest her hand, after the manner of a carriage strap." Author Woodbury, a onetime anthropologist and a ninth-generation descendant of William Goffe, is the present proprietor of the family mill. He has tied his odd bag of characters together with historical facts, New England folkways and early Americana. John Goffe's Legacy crackles with wit, adds a few asterisks to history, and makes the reader wonder how New England ever acquired a reputation for being stolid and conservative.

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