A Measure of Light

by Beth Powning

  He lectured on the sixth chapter of the Song of Solomon.

  “ ‘My beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies. I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.’ ”

  At four o’clock, the congregation was allowed briefly to rise.

  At six, Mary suffered pains in her bladder and an intolerable hunger.

  The lecture continued until the room was in total darkness save for one candle on the lectern. At eight o’clock, Cotton turned over his last paper. The people rose to their feet with audible sighs.

  They sang.

  As they left the meeting house, they passed the woman at the mock gallows. They did not look at her.

  The next day, when she went to the well with Anne to gather the day’s water, Mary was surprised not to hear a single complaint about cold, or hunger, or the length of the sermon. Rather, the women argued about the lecture with heated excitement and Anne told them which parts she would elucidate at her Monday meeting.

  Across the square, the mock gallows was gone and the stocks were empty.

  “Nay,” Anne said, following Mary’s glance. “’Twas only a first offence.”

  On a grey day striated with the first snow, they breakfasted with the Hutchinsons one last time and walked to their new home.

  That night, Mary sat up late, absorbing the new space of the little house, turning the pages of her Bible. The baby was due in one week. They wished to baptize it into the church and so they themselves must be accepted into it.

  Tomorrow they would stand before the ministers for examination.

  She thought of Wilson and Cotton—their bald, uncompromising statements. Of how, here in the New Jerusalem, women had no role in church affairs, and were evidently meant to show humility as befitted their place in the order of creation.

  We are above animals, above servants, above children …

  In the fireplace, a log crumbled in a shower of sparks. William had gone to bed.

  “Either I know it or I don’t,” he had said, bending to press a kiss on her forehead. Unsaid was the fact that he was a merchant, young, strong and clever with a good head for figures. He would be found acceptable.

  In the dim light, Mary bent to the Bible, turned the thin paper, felt herself repelling anger. Anne, herself, so clearly one of God’s elect—graced with a fertile body and a keen mind—had not been taken into the church without an extra week of examination. Offensive, the ministers had called her. In your words and behaviour. They had questioned her more keenly than her husband, yet had been unable to find any reason to deny her admission to the church.

  Mary looked up from the Bible. Just yesterday they had been slicing apples when Anne told her the story of her offence.

  “’Twas because on the voyage over I argued vehemently with one of the ministers. People below decks heard our shouts.” Anne had flicked a long, curling apple skin onto the floor. “When I objected to his doctrine, he dared to tell me I had no right to question him.” Anne laid her knife on the table and spread her arms. She made her voice pompous, furious. “ ‘For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man!’ And I said, ‘God revealed to me the date of our arrival. Can you predict on what date the ship shall arrive?’ He said I could have had no such revelation. ‘How dare you say such a thing?’ I answered. I advised the women to ignore him for the rest of the voyage. And do you know? The ship arrived on my predicted date.”

  Mary pictured the night sky as she had seen it minutes ago as she returned from the outhouse. Stars spread in coruscating clouds against the wet-slate blackness. She had heard the distant boom of surf and the rustle of dried blueberry leaves. She had seen the lights of houses. One, here. Far off, another.

  Wind moaned in the flue, an updraft so strong that it stretched the flames and wakened the coals.

  She picked up the Bible and cradled it against her breast. In such a place, a person’s smallest act would be laid bare to God—and thus, she thought, one’s existence could become a matter of terror. Or ecstasy.

  Three sour-faced men sat at a table, scratching words on linen parchment with turkey feather quills. Their woollen doublets smelled of lard and pancakes.

  “And did you see that you were without Christ?”

  “Aye.”

  “And who was it who hath opened thine eyes?”

  “I attended to the words of Reverend Everard. ’Twas his sermon on suffering. Romans 8:17. ‘If so be that we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified together.’ ”

  “Will you tell us of this sermon and how it gave you new birth?”

  “He speaks of self-ends and the dangers therein. He asks us to consider this text: ‘Wide is the Gate, and broad is the Way, that leads to Destruction, and many go in thereat: but strait is the Gate, and narrow is the Way, that leadeth to Life, and few there be that find it.’ ”

  “And how thinketh you to find it?”

  She bowed her head, knowing she must choose her answer carefully. The child surged in her womb and she could not repress a sigh.

  “Sit, Mistress Dyer,” said Reverend Cotton. He rose and carried a chair around to the place where she stood.

  “How thinketh you to find it?” he repeated, resuming his seat. His voice was not without kindness.

  “I will not eschew suffering,” she said. “I will heed the words of John. ‘He who does what is true comes to the light, that it may be clearly seen that his deeds have been wrought in God.’ ”

  Outside, the gulls mewed as they soared on the winter wind. This morning she had wakened in a room so icy that urine was solid in the chamber pot. She had clung to sleep, drenched in a dream of her mother’s garden. Within the garden walls, she might have been bird, bee, zephyr—drifting in essence of summer, the sun-softened petals of blue delphinium or white rose, the pollen-laden sweetness.

  She straightened her back, lifted her chin and saw not the men crouched over the table but her dream, its beauty. The awe of it, the wonder. At this moment, Reverend Cotton lifted stern eyes to hers. He seemed startled by her expression, and for a moment they looked at one another and did not move or speak.

  William started from his chair. He put an arm around Mary, pulled her back from the hearth.

  “Do you send for Anne,” she breathed.

  It was nearing the shortest day of the year. Although the household had not yet eaten, shadows played on the mud-packed walls. Pain closed down around Mary and took her to where she could not distinguish place or sequence, one minute hearing William calling for Jurden over the groan of the door’s hinges, then feeling Sinnie’s hands gentle at her waist, the frigid air of the bedchamber, her own voice crying in the distance. And for a blessed moment, the world’s return—feather ticking beneath her, Sinnie’s yellow sleeve, comfort as the pain ebbed like a broken wave.

  Anne swept into the house, talking rapidly.

  “More water, Sinnie. Where are the linens? Put these herbs in a pot. Have you hooks? Build up the fire in her chamber … ’tis freezing.”

  She came to the bedside, knelt, took Mary’s hands.

  “Mary.”

  Mary twisted with a fresh spiral of pain, crying out for Aunt Urith. She pressed hands to cheeks, panting.

  “Open your eyes.”

  “I will die, Anne. Surely I will die.”

  “Nonsense. Where are your prayers? Say with me: ‘Answer me when I call, O God of my right! Thou hast …’ ”

  Anne’s eyes were direct and calm.

  Other women came—Mrs. Bell, Mrs. Coddington, Jane Hawkins and a nursing mother. Between pains, Mary walked until she no longer had the strength. Then she lay on her side—rocking, moaning. In the breaking light of dawn, she slid to the edge of the bed and lay like a fish in a basket, other women’s arms beneath hers, her legs draped in the crook of elbows, a body pressed to her back, voices murmuring in her ears, Sinnie singing softly: and at the moment of Mary’s longest wail, a baby slid i
nto the waiting hands of Anne Hutchinson.

  “My dear.” Her voice was tender. “God hath graced you with a perfect boy.”

  Mary heard William’s voice, light with relief. Hands rolled her, wrapping her in warm cloth. Someone held a mug of hot wine to her lips. Just before the baby was passed for his first milk, to be taken from the breast of the young woman who had come for the purpose, he was lowered into Mary’s arms. The baby’s veined purple eyelids and wrinkled brow formed an expression of concentration, as if the infant strove to remain in his place of perfection.

  FIVE

  First Winter - 1636

  THEY NAMED HIM SAMUEL.

  Two weeks after his birth, a blizzard swept down from the northeast. Fires roared on both hearths, snowflakes were dashed down the flue and hissed in the flames. Mary lay with her back to William; he pulled her close for warmth. She reached a hand into the icy darkness, rocked the high-sided cradle.

  William slept deeply, exhausted. The men had begun to build a fort on the point. Every man must work for two weeks—William having closed his shop in the market during the time—for the ministers told them that if they worked as one to obey God, then God would give them prosperity. From sunrise to dusk, he spent the days in a saw pit, or wielding a draw shave, or driving tenon into mortise. He had been made clerk of the enterprise.

  The wind retreated, muttered, rose again in hollow whistles.

  Along the coast, adrift in the darkness of winter, were other settlements—Salem, Plymouth, Providence. Mary wondered if other English people lay in their beds listening to the storm. If they, like her, felt an occasional, appalled sense of regret at what they had done.

  … they will not adventure much, they will not sell all, part with all, they will not loose their Hold …

  She reminded herself of John Everard’s sermon that had set her upon her path. Of why they had come. Vanity, excess, the sullied church.

  Against the paper window, snow made a crackling spit, like blown sand.

  In the austerity of conviction, finally, she slept.

  The next morning, they woke to knee-deep snow. Mary stood in the door lifting the baby’s hand to wave goodbye to William. The thatched-roofed houses on the hillside above the marsh seemed to her like boulders, grey humps amidst the cresting drifts.

  Snow whirled into their faces and Samuel began to cry.

  “Hush, my love.”

  She lowered him into the cradle, tucked the quilt close. The ministers on Truelove had lectured that women must produce children continuously in order to populate the New Jerusalem.

  She and Sinnie stood gazing down at the baby, whose eyelids thickened as he drifted into sleep.

  “Mr. Cotton says that babies are born sprawling in wickedness.” Mary spoke as if to herself. “He says they must be led from the evil to which they are naturally prone. He says we must keep them at a distance, nor show too great an affection lest they cease to revere us as they must.”

  She did not say that she harboured a secret sin, fearing she obeyed Mr. Cotton’s second edict by nature rather than by design, for she found herself shielding her heart against its breaking. Every day she woke expecting that Samuel would have died in his sleep; or would be infected with some deadly sickness; or would be killed in an accident by day’s end.

  “Ah, Mistress. I can see no more wickedness in that child’s eyes than I see in a kitten’s.”

  Sinnie dropped to her knees by the cradle, ran the back of her finger over the baby’s cheek. She loved to rock him to sleep, whispering of her rocky island, of Finnigirt Dyke, of wild birds’ eggs and sheep dogs. Now, beneath her breath, as if to nullify Mr. Cotton’s nonsense, she recited the Lord’s Prayer in Norn—“Fy vor or er I Chimeri, Halaght vara nam dit …”

  Mary listened, transfixed by the soft rush of words. When the prayer ended, she took a deep breath. “Well, Sinnie. Let’s begin.”

  She watched from the doorstep as Sinnie, bundled in cloak and scarves, trudged away through the snow, buckets swinging from a yoke. On the air, glittering with icy flakes, came the bawling of cows, shouts from the fort. She went back inside, set salt cod to soak, scooped hominy from a basket. The morning’s milk steamed—Jurden had set it by the shed door. She heard the chock-chunk of his axe, splitting wood. She paused to consider that everywhere her eyes landed she saw only further work. William’s wadmore stockings, their heels worn thin. The lye pot, needing to be emptied. The corn, coming to a boil. Even as she thought this, Samuel’s mouth opened in a wet shuddering wail.

  At sunset, Mary sat in a low chair by the fire holding the baby to her breast. The room was close from smoke blown back down the flue; messy with wet clothing, sewing baskets, cornmeal spilled on the poplar-wood table. Along the crack under the door, snow lay in a white curve.

  William’s lantern came swinging through the blue dusk. He entered through the front door, carrying a chunk of knotty pitch pine—candlewood, it was called, since light was cast by burning its resinous splints. A dead duck was flung over one shoulder and his greatcoat was sprinkled with sawdust. He dropped wood and duck on the hearth by her chair. She smiled up at him and felt her mood lift as the oppressive sense of unfinished work was leavened by his presence.

  They sat together at the trestle table—William, Mary, Jurden and Sinnie.

  Jurden was courting a young woman he had met on the ship. Even so, Sinnie would not raise her eyes to his, kept her elbows pinned to her sides.

  William read the prayer and they lifted their spoons.

  “Your hand, Miss,” Jurden exclaimed, surprised; then he gentled his tone. “What did happen?”

  “A burn,” Sinnie murmured to her bowl. “I did touch my hand to the brick.”

  “Sliding this good cornbread from the oven,” Mary said. She looked at the two young people, saddened by the formality Sinnie’s fear imposed. “You must put more grease on it tonight.”

  The wind moaned and the clavicle of snow by the doorsill changed shape.

  “Roger Williams will not keep quiet,” William remarked. “They may send him back to England sooner than spring.”

  “Who is Roger Williams?”

  “A young English minister. A man of strong opinions. He hath been preaching of soul liberty.”

  Steam from the succotash swirled in the candlelight. Mary repeated the words, to feel them in her mouth.

  “ ‘Soul liberty.’ What does he mean by it?”

  “He feels that every man must form his own opinion on the subject of religion. He hath cried foul to the magistrates for enforcing belief. But that is not the worst of it.”

  Soul liberty.

  “He hath defamed their authority. He says they should not have taken land from the Indians. They say he is entertaining company in his house at Salem and preaching of this.”

  Their spoons scraped, clattered.

  You arrive at a place you have long imagined. And once there, again you look outwards.

  Until William was made a freeman by the General Court, he could not vote or buy land. So he must wait, work, keep his counsel. He did not speak about the ministers, the harsh laws.

  There is much that I, too, ponder and dare not speak of.

  Her breasts were swollen, hot. She saw the drying mush on the wooden trenchers.

  Floors to sweep, bowls to scour, the baby to feed.

  Her hands ached, her hips and back and legs felt heavy, her eyes were dry. She was so tired as not to be sleepy.

  As she poured hot water into the washing-up bucket, William leaned on his elbows, staring into the fire.

  Parts of him have vanished, others have grown.

  Samuel woke, hungry, and Sinnie was at the cradle, swift as a swallow, soothing the child with Norn words. She handed him to Mary, who tucked herself onto a rush-seated chair and unbuttoned her tunic. The baby’s lips found the nipple, began their powerful suck. Mary felt William’s gaze and raised her eyes to his.

  Undue attachment—not only of parent to child, but of husba
nd to wife—must be guarded against.

  Lest ye place the creature before the creator.

  This William did not obey. Ambition and worry, like a cloud of sediment, slowly cleared as his eyes rested on her. Were Sinnie and Jurden not in the room, Mary saw, he would come to her, kneel, take her face in his hands. A soft kiss, not to disturb the baby.

  “My love,” he would say.

  Mary wrote to Aunt Urith. The letter would not be sent until the next ship came into harbour and so she kept the paper in a cupboard drawer, taking it out after the day’s work was done. It became grease-spattered, redolent of cinnamon and the drawer’s pine boards.

  January 1636

  My beloved Aunt Urith,

  I take up my pen in a place so dissimilar from your abode that words do fail me to put it to a description save to say that I have heard the howling of wolves only dimmed by an augmentation of the ever-present and lamenting wind. Baby Samuel groweth fair and lusty and as for William, the Queen whose gloves he once chose would now quail before him, so rugged and rough-skinned hath he become.

  She paused. That morning she had passed the whipping post. Blood and the knotted rope seemed a transference, so quickly did the red beads leap from the flesh of the man bound to it. He screamed as the whip fell. Four hours later when she went to Anne Hutchinson’s house, she had seen him again, slumped in the stocks. Dark fluids oozed from the wounds upon his naked back.

  No. She would not write of it.

  I am oft worried at myself, for I find my heart closing against this child. I fear losing him, as I lost the first—and so I dare not love. Dost thou have knowledge of this in others, my aunt? God spared thee from childbirth for your skills in such matters. Sinnie is like a mother to my babe and for this I am grateful to the good providence of God. Her heart yearns for children, yet I doubt she will ever have them, so feared is she of men. The good God hath surely sent her to me, for she is a treasure beyond compare, and thanks to her ministerings, Samuel is full-cheeked, perfect in form, and blesseth us with his childish pratings.