Martha Peake

by Patrick Mcgrath

  “He is called Harry,” she whispered, for she did not want to wake him. None of the women uttered a word.

  “What’s the matter?” she whispered. Still nothing. She grew alarmed.

  “What’s wrong?” she said. “Is he not well?”

  “He is well,” said Mistress Winthrop, not looking up.

  “Then what is it?”

  Maddy Rind spoke at last. “It is this, Martha, we are surprised, we did not expect—”

  “What?” She truly did not understand.

  “His back,” she said, and fell silent, gazing at Martha now with damp eyes that seemed imploring or compassionate, she could not tell which.

  “He has my father’s back,” she said.

  “But what a sad thing,” said Maddy Rind, sitting by the bed, laying a hand on Martha’s cheek, gazing at her with eyes like pools, she was that close to tears.

  “I am not sad,” said Martha.

  “But think of Adam.”

  Adam? What had he to do with this? She was perplexed, but it was a mere breath of a breeze on the deep strong warm wordless flow of love that rose inside her. This talk of Adam was unimportant, she had her son in her arms! She turned away from her aunt and gazed once more at the little miraculous being asleep on her breast. She smelled his skin and felt his tiny shallow gulps of breath. Was that all? If he was strong and well as Mistress Winthrop said, what else mattered? Maddy Rind glanced at the other women and they turned away and one after another silently left the room.

  Maddy then stood gazing uncertainly down at Martha, and Martha was filled with love for her too. She took her aunt’s hand and brought it to her lips. She thanked her. She glowed, she was radiant, she was all love. Maddy smiled down at her niece but her forehead was a knot of worried questions. Martha tried to reassure her, she laid her aunt’s hand gently on her baby’s skull and covered it with her own.

  “Adam will be happy,” she said.

  “I hope so, Martha,” said Maddy. She sat down again and, still stroking his head, stared hard at the sleeping infant.

  “I hope so,” she said again, and still Martha heard those worried questions in her voice.

  A little later Martha’s cousins were allowed to come and see her infant son. They did not stand back as the women had, they were curious, they were filled with wonder, they were adoring. They looked at Martha with new eyes, they had not dreamed their loud cousin from England could create a little being with eyes and hands who spluttered and clenched his tiny fingers, who had hair as soft as spun silk and skin as clear as light. Very gently they traced the curve of the little hump on his back, and were astonished at how soft the little bones were. They declared him perfect and Martha lay there bathing in their pleasure and allowed Sara to hold him in her arms, and oh, she was so careful, there was no need to warn her what a precious cargo she held. She gazed down at his face with great seriousness.

  “Little man,” she whispered.

  None of the women had asked to hold him, but the Rind girls were eager to, and as one by one they lifted him into their arms Martha wondered why the women had behaved so strangely. Did they think the child bewitched? Did they think the hand of Satan was in the making of his backbone? She had heard similar nonsense in her few months in New Morrock, for the beliefs of a century past lived on in certain minds which had had no benefit of education—did they think she had lain with the devil? It suddenly made her want to shout with laughter, that an idea so ridiculous could still be taken seriously when a new age of reason was teaching men that old beliefs, like old systems of government, must be swept away—and for a minute or two a passion stirred in her, a spark or two drifted up from the slumbering embers—until she remembered again the infant in her arms; and when this blindly groping little creature sought her breast and began to suckle, she lay back and thought of nothing, and all ideas of Progress and Reason slipped away like so many pieces of flotsam drifting on the tide.

  Three days she remained in bed and she would not let Harry out of her sight despite all attempts on the part of her aunt to take him away from her. Joshua Rind came up to tell her what was customary in the first days after birth, but she told him she did not give a fig for custom, she only cared for her son, and that she intended to look after him herself. The doctor examined Harry’s spine, he peered at it through his spectacles, he frowned at it and tentatively touched it with a finger, then threw a glance at Martha that at once convinced her that he too thought she had had congress with the devil. When she said this he became embarrassed and said, no no no, but in such a way that she suspected he had entertained the idea, or one similar to it. He pronounced no judgment on her Harry and went away still frowning, after patting her hand and absently congratulating her on bringing a healthy American boy into the world.

  “He will be named for his father, then?” he said, pausing at the door. Martha lifted her head from the pillow. He would be named for his father, of course he would, he had been already; but the doctor meant Adam.

  “He will be named for my father,” she said, and the doctor nodded and left the room.

  He was not impressed with this nephew of his, the backbone troubled him it was plain to see, but Martha knew that in time he and the rest of them would come to see her son as she did, and then it would not matter what shape his back was. She did not say this yet, she knew the reputation young mothers had for creating grand illusions about unremarkable infants, but her Harry was different. This was no foolish illusion. There was greatness in him even then, and she did not need to explain this to others, it would become clear to them all in time.

  Three days she lay abed; and then she could stay there no longer, even though she was still stitched up with catgut where Harry had torn her, the stitching done swiftly and neatly by her aunt Maddy, and the wound not yet fully healed. She was sore, but she could move about, and what pleasure it was to have her body as it used to be, no longer vast and bovine. Harry was an easy child to care for, he never cried, he slept sound, and if his hunger for her milk left her red and tender she did not care, it was for him and he was welcome to it all. He quickly lost the blindly wrinkled appearance of the first hours and became instead a placid handsome baby with a huge wispy red skull and tiny perfect limbs. She had always to lay him on his belly when he slept, for fear he would crush his spine.

  But what a beautiful spine it was! The morning after the night he was born Martha made an extraordinary discovery about her baby’s spine. She had slept deep and long after her labours. In a clean nightshirt, and between clean sheets, her body bathed and stitched and her sore parts smeared with ointments, she had sunk into the most blessed oblivion she had ever known. Harry had slept beside her in a crib on rockers which in its time had served all the Rind children. She awoke to a day of wind and blue sky, the storm having passed out to sea leaving the air and the land cleansed and fresh.

  For a second on awakening she did not know what had happened to her and why she hurt; then she sat up and leaned over to the crib, which she had pulled close to the bed before falling asleep, and found her son lying on his belly and stirring into wakefulness, his face all squeezed tight, his little hands groping about him. And then he yawned, he yawned hugely, she was delighted by this great yawn and clapped her hands to her face lest she shout out with joy and frighten him! He yawned, and then he opened his eyes.

  Martha heaved herself gingerly out from under the sheets and sitting on the edge of the bed, lifted him out of his crib. He made not a sound. He gazed at her with an expression of profound contentment in which she thought she glimpsed a hint of a spark of interest in the large female beaming at him with eyes filled with tears. They were alone together for the first time. Feeling the warmth of his mother’s body he closed his eyes and lay against her breast, and did this with such utter trust that she was unable now to hold back the tears and they streamed down her face even as she smiled and murmured and stroked his soft head. She could hear her cousins in the yard below, she could see the sky, big whi
te clouds kicking along before the wind, she knew days like this and loved the salty freshness they brought; so she stood up, painfully, and carried him to the window. It was the first day of his life!

  She showed him the world. That is, she showed him as much of the world as could be seen from the back of Silas Rind’s house, that much world comprising a yard, a well, a barn, a broad field that Silas and Caesar had cleared with their own hands, a wall they had built with stones dug up from the earth in that field, three grazing horses, a wagon, several outhouses and woodsheds, an old boat up on blocks, a vegetable garden with a high fence to keep out the deer, and beyond that the forest, where the first foliage created a distant canvas of shimmering greenness, and the high boughs tossed in the wind. Beyond the forest lay the mountains, still with snow on their peaks, huge indomitable mountains, and beyond them more mountains, and beyond them still more, and great river valleys between filled with good rich pasture and game, on and on into the west, all of it America, and Martha said this to her son.

  “America,” she whispered, as Harry blinked at the world. “Springtime,” she whispered. “And there,” she whispered, “friends.”

  The three girls had seen them at the window, they had been watching for them, and now they stood waving and calling out, “Good morning, Harry!” But it was too much for him, America and springtime and friends, all on his first morning, and his face puckered like a prune, he let out a wail, so Martha went back to bed and produced from inside her nightshirt a large breast. Harry laid to with a will.

  It was not until later, when he was fed, and had slept again, that she made her discovery. She was again standing with him at the window, and his nightshirt had slipped off his shoulders so he was bare from the waist up. As she held him against the glass the light of the day streamed in and she saw that so delicate was the little structure of flared bone lifting from his spine, so fragile and porous the membrane of skin stretched over it, that it let through the light, it was translucent, it seemed almost to glow, to shine, it seemed ethereal, a thing without substance or mass, for within she could distinguish each of the tiny white bones of its construction. Later, as he grew, his skin lost its translucency and she never saw those tiny bones again. But that day she saw her child’s spine through a film of skin as fine as the finest muslin, and she knew at once that this was no stigma, nor a piece of mere clumsiness in the work of careless Nature, no, it was given him to mark him out from other men, and she would teach him to carry it with pride.

  35

  So the first days passed. Little Harry groped and blinked and fed and slept and rarely showed any sign of discontent; and life went on in a town without men, the women providing what they had been told the Revolution required of them, that is, that they be the alert second line but also the peaceful embodiment of continuity. Though Martha was at this time so deeply occupied with her infant and his welfare that her stronger passions were entirely diverted from the cause.

  Silas, it seemed, was well, camped with his men on a hill above Charlestown, but of Adam nothing was known, the expedition to Ticonderoga having sent back no messengers to report its progress. Maddy Rind worried about her son coming home to find his child a humpback, but Martha knew Adam’s nature, he was a good boy and would share her delight in the child, believing himself the father.

  Then one day it occurred to Martha that it was not Adam’s reaction to the infant that worried her aunt, but Maddy’s own. She saw how Maddy never picked him up, how she watched him with troubled eyes, and how, when Martha tried to make her see him as she did, her aunt turned away and went off about her tasks. All at once she suspected that Maddy had been listening to the old women, and had decided that this little monster of Martha’s could not have come from the seed of a Rind.

  This was a bad shock. This frightened her. She knew how the ignorant reacted to those who differed from them in some marked way, how they subdued the disorder they felt by invoking the figure of the monster, had she not seen what they did to her father? Now they would do it to her son. But the thought of it only stiffened her resolve. For there was a bedrock of dogged resistance in Martha Peake that would see her fight to the last breath for that which she loved; and she would die for her son, of this she was certain. She did not care about herself, let them revile her as much as they wanted, just so long as Harry could find shelter in her shadow.

  In time the little rocking crib came down to the kitchen, and there Harry spent his days as the women went about their work around him. Martha was pleased to have the company of her cousins, for they did not share their mother’s aversion to her child. They continued to declare him perfect, and lifted him from his crib with such tenderness it filled her with deep joy to see it. The older women watched with sidelong glances, or from lowered eyes, and she did not try to guess what new strange notions they had invented to explain to each other why his spine was deformed. It was not easy to live beneath a constant cloud of suspicion but she was equal to it, and believed it would change as soon as the men came back.

  Whenever they were alone together Martha whispered her fears to Harry, and her hopes too. She took him with her when she first left the house and walked down to the dock with Sara, to learn what news there was from Boston. And she was aware at once that the changed attitude toward her in Maddy Rind’s kitchen was shared by other women in the town, who sat working on the boats in the sunshine, but turned away when Martha and Sara approached, and watched them as they passed, then whispered to one another behind their hands, spitting into the harbour and touching the various talismans they secreted in the depths of their scaly clothing.

  Martha had seen how the Americans celebrated the birth of a child, the impression they gave that each new American strengthened their claims and prospects on this continent; as though they knew they were engaged in a great act of creation, and that with every new child they acquired another pair of hands to assist in the task. Another American mind, another American heart, another American back; but it seemed they wanted nothing to do with her Harry’s back. So she displayed him to the world all the more proudly, hurt and angered by their cruelty but determined to show nothing of it.

  She stood with her baby at the end of Rind’s Wharf, arm in arm with Sara, and gazed out to sea. No doubt the women believed she was thinking warmly of England, but no, she was damning them all to hell, and she told Sara she did not care what they thought of her, she had faced hardships a hundred times worse than the malign idiocy of old women who had never read a book. But she regretted most bitterly that the fierce joy she had in her son was soured by the hostility of these certain elements of the town. She stared out to sea with her child in her arms and prayed for the men to come back. Everything would change when the men came back.

  The Congress met in Philadelphia in May. They had much to discuss. John Adams faced men from other colonies who believed there was still some point in trying to negotiate with the king. How Martha snorted when she heard this! The English would not let them go without a fight, she felt she knew them well enough by now. The idea of liberty may have arisen in England, but there it had withered on the branch because the English continued to bow the head and kiss the boot of men whose power and wealth came of the accident of birth, no more than that. As if a man’s value, his virtue, his character could be inherited from his father and not earned! Whereas here in the New World it did not matter who your father was; and just as well, thought Martha, when she reflected on her own child’s paternity.

  Meanwhile the patriot army sat by its campfires on the hills above Boston and waited. In New Morrock the women talked of politics and food supplies and had to be content with what few scraps of either came their way. With many of the boats still out of the water, and the men who sailed them far away, the cod that fed the town and created its wealth remained at liberty in the sea. Sara, with mischievous intent to annoy her mother, declared at supper one night, as they made another frugal meal of corn and potatoes, that cod had rights too.

  “
We are surely no better than the tyrant on the throne of England if we use them solely for our own needs and pleasure,” she said. “Perhaps,” she said, “after the war, the cod will be allowed to create a republic in the sea.”

  Martha thought this very amusing, but her aunt sniffed, while Joshua Rind peered at Sara over his little spectacles and asked her, was she serious? When she told him indeed she was, he said he would attempt to make peace with his conscience and remain a republican among men but a tyrant in the matter of fish. Hester Rind then declared that she would eat no more potatoes, for did not potatoes have rights too? This presented a problem, said Sara, for if people starved to preserve the liberty of potatoes, then the republic of potatoes would be lost, for there would be nobody to plant them and dig them.

  Joshua Rind then remarked that the king undoubtedly regarded his colonial subjects as potatoes and justified abusing their rights for the same reason. They decided that alas, potatoes must be deprived of their liberty if the race of potatoes was to survive. They were all tyrants, said Sara, all of them having devoured their potatoes, then added that only Harry was innocent, for he took nourishment from his mother’s breast and this did not affect her liberty at all.

  At the mention of Harry’s innocence Martha caught a sharp glance from her aunt Maddy; such talk did not go on when Silas was present! Rising to clear the table she suggested to the doctor that he stop talking rubbish about potatoes and tell them what he had heard of the doings of the Congress.

  There was news, said Joshua, important news, and they were all at once impatient to know what it was. Joshua Rind, gouty rooster among the hens, enjoyed moments of power like this, and he took his time charging up that dreadful stinky white pipe of his with the tiny quantity of tobacco he allowed himself in these days of general shortage. Having lit it with a taper, and inhaled the only decent mouthful he was likely to get from it, he looked round the table and at last told them that Mr. Adams—not Silas’ Mr. Adams, the other one, John Adams—in his wisdom John Adams had put forward for general of the Continental Army not his old friend Mr. Hancock, but George Washington of Virginia.