A Measure of Light

by Beth Powning

  —

  The adults of three families squeezed around one table: Hutchinsons, Wheelwrights and Dyers. Rich, evening light stretched across the floorboards, up the daub wall, onto pussy willows in an earthenware vase.

  Anne scooped hasty pudding from an iron pot. Children carried trenchers to the table.

  “We shall petition the church that you be co-pastor with Reverend Wilson,” Anne said to her brother-in-law, John Wheelwright.

  Mary studied the new faces, impatient to hear news of home. Anne snapped spoonfuls of pudding, squinting in the blue-grey swirls of steam, nodding at the places where the trenchers were to be set. The children, Mary saw, were entirely accustomed to their mother’s bold pronouncements.

  “Wilson is our minister, Cotton is our teacher. Whereas they do both believe in the inevitability of God’s will, Reverend Wilson lays undue weight on morality.” She paused, glanced at the children. “He believes that by ‘works,’ a strictly moral life, a person proves that he is saved. There are many who would be glad to set a balance to Reverend Wilson’s views. You would be such a one, brother John.”

  John Wheelwright sat with shoulders held back and chin lifted, accentuating his height, drawing down his eyelids. He wore a silk cap; his cheeks were burnished from the crossing.

  “I should be happy to do so.” He held one palm upright, his fingertips making minute tremblings. “My views are much like those of Reverend Cotton. Yet I have heard talk that he is tainted. Such nonsense. Or is it?” He glanced at Will Hutchinson and William, surprised that the men did not weigh in. “You are as Protestants and Catholics here with your diverging opinions on ‘works’ and ‘grace.’ Indeed, it has been well noted in England.”

  Anne looked steadily at Wheelwright, gauging him. “Aye, there is great controversy. Do not underestimate it. Governor Winthrop would silence me, for he doth believe that my teachings undermine his authority.”

  “Is it so? Truly?” Wheelwright’s voice quickened, startled by her rebuke.

  Mary watched steam rising from the trencher set between her and William, a fine column that broke and spun into coils before thinning, vanishing.

  We talk as we did in England.

  She held Samuel on her lap. He reached for the steaming pudding and she snatched his hand. Spring birdsong was admitted by the half-opened door yet still they wore their unwashed woollens and sat pressed close as if from winter’s cold. She becomes angry, Mary thought, watching her friend. She is right, and knows it. The more they try to silence her, the more steely she will become.

  Anne circled the spoon around the bottom of the pot. “I say that those graced by the Holy Spirit do apprehend it within themselves. Therefore they cannot be preached to by those who do not evidence such grace. I believe some of our preachers are not graced.”

  Wheelwright’s fingers tightened on his spoon. “Indeed.”

  “Nor do I believe that perfect behaviour evidences sanctification. The governor says that I undermine both the preachers and the laws that do insist upon righteousness.”

  Will Hutchinson watched his wife, and then slid an appeasing glance at Wheelwright, as if making an offering. “My wife hath set fear in some who need a check on their power. The clergy here have set themselves up like the bishops.”

  “These are not my motives, Will, and you do know it.” Anne spoke quickly, annoyed. “I speak my mind and there are many who show interest.”

  A large pewter mug of ale was passed around the table, finger-warmed. Each person turned it slightly before drinking. Will Hutchinson drank, then caught William Dyer’s eyes as he passed it to him. Mary saw the two men—both merchants, neither with religious passion—share a look. Will you speak or shall I? it said, and her William sat forward on his chair and leaned towards the newcomers.

  “The issue of works and grace, do you see, is setting a divide between the people, for it becomes a matter of power—whom the people will trust and whom they will follow. There are the ministers and magistrates on the one hand; the merchants on the other. We merchants support Anne Hutchinson. In recent weeks, the General Court hath seen fit to tell us how much we may pay our workers. How much we may charge for our goods. My profits have dwindled overnight.”

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, passed the mug carefully to the old lady on his right.

  “You will find that although there is no clergy on the General Court, only church members can stand for office. Do you understand?”

  Wheelwright nodded. “Church and state.”

  “Aye,” William said. “When we left, Archbishop Laud and King Charles were hand in hand. Sometimes I do wonder what is the difference here. The General Court doth make its own rules, and they are not the rules of England. If unsure as to what constitutes a crime or how to mete punishment, the court asks advice of the church elders. Or of the ministers.”

  “And which ministers hold your views, my sister?” Wheelwright asked.

  Anne finally took her place at the table. She sat with her hands in her lap looking out the window.

  Forty-five years old. And the Lord hath sent her fifteen babies.

  The colony’s unsoftened light picked out silver hairs wisping from beneath Anne’s coif, laid shadows in the spidery lines beside her mouth. Yes, children he had sent, Mary thought—but some he had called home. Susan, Elizabeth, William. Heaven beckoned, heartbreaking in its beauty and its necessity.

  “Mr. Cotton,” Anne said, her voice suddenly spent. “Mr. Cotton is my teacher and it is his words I seek to elucidate.” She sighed, reached for a spoon. “As I did at home. As he has asked me to do here. Will, please to say the grace. Our pudding doth grow cold.”

  In the late spring dusk, William brought home the news that Henry Vane had been elected governor. They left the front door open to watch the pink light on the water below. The night was alive with clickings and trills—blackbirds, frogs, insects. Mary laughed at William’s exuberance.

  “Tonight the merchants will set off fireworks in the harbour,” he said to baby Samuel, holding him up like a package and tilting him from side to side, making him dance like a marionette.

  At bedtime, the throbbing of the peepers were as heat between her legs and she lay naked on the bed, waiting for William. His silhouette paused, in the doorway. She could not read his expression, but heard rustles and clinks as he undressed slowly, facing her. His tongue, circling her navel. Her heels, on the small of his back as he entered her. Afterwards, they lay listening to the sweet chiming of the marsh.

  She twirled a piece of his hair, relaxation even in her fingers.

  We shall prosper …

  A week later, William brought more sobering news. The church elders had decided that John Wheelwright should not become Wilson’s co-pastor, but would be sent down the coast to the new settlement at Mount Wollaston.

  Keeping him far from Anne.

  “Aye, they will have him form a new church there,” he said. “We shall barely hear tell of him.”

  —

  All summer, women gathered at “whangs”—work-bees to make dreary tasks less arduous. At Goody Pearl’s house, they gathered a winter’s worth of soiled clothing, pillowcases, sheets, dishcloths. Water steamed over the fire, the windows were thrown wide to the warble of blackbirds. Scrubbing, splashing, they spoke of childbirth and children, nostrums and illness; they pondered passages from the Bible, argued points of Mr. Cotton’s lesson; then they lowered their voices to whispers, as if compelled to unburden themselves of the old country fairy stories or the folk customs once woven like ribbons into the season’s tapestry—Maypoles, ash faggots, Devil’s stones.

  “Hush …”

  They discussed Anne’s ideas. Or they murmured of Roger Williams, who had surfaced after fourteen months of perilous wandering. He had been saved, in the dead of winter, by an Indian, who had kept him fed and warm. He had made his way to Narragansett Bay and had founded a new settlement, which he named Providence, on the Moshassuck River and proclaimed
it a refuge for religious dissenters who suffered for conscience’s sake. The women expressed their relief that his wife and children had finally joined him.

  “Reverend Wilson did tell us we should spy on one another,” a woman remarked. She was sitting cross-legged, a small bucket on her lap filled with soapy water. She scrubbed a baby’s cap.

  A burst of laughter, quickly hushed.

  “I know all your secrets, Joan Croucher,” another woman said. “Shall I go tell Mr. Wilson about the itch in your …”

  “Shhhhhh.”

  “His mouth,” one whispered, “doth look as if he sucked a lemon.”

  Soapy water, splashed across the kitchen. Little girls looked up from their wooden dolls, open-mouthed at the giggling.

  “If he do speak so about us one more time. Saying we are weak and timorous. I should like to see him push a baby through …”

  “We should stand at his outrages and leave the meeting house,” Anne Hutchinson remarked.

  The mood changed, swift as shadow.

  “They would whip us.”

  “They would have us in the stocks.”

  “Nay,” Anne said. She bent over a washboard, scrubbing a pocket. Its string wrapped around her soapy wrist and she paused to unwind it. “We may plead a woman’s complaint.”

  The idea was too outrageous to contemplate.

  They talked, instead, of beans and the white mould that grew around their stems, separating plant from root.

  Reverend Wilson preached for an hour and a half. Empty bellies gurgled, rumbled. A dog began barking, close by. Men exchanged glances but no one rose to silence it. Mary felt sweat trickle down her back. She had ceased to listen; imagined, instead, the moors of Kettlesing with their cool, heathery winds.

  “Women are incapable of reason,” Reverend Wilson announced, changing topic. He leaned over, set his elbow upon the pulpit and turned his palm upwards, fixing his gaze on the men. His upper lip was so short as to appear swallowed by the lower. Large, hooded black eyes brooded beside a nose curved as a sparrowhawk’s beak.

  “Men, do you attend to your wives. They are credulous and easily led astray.”

  Anne, Mary and two other women caught each other’s eyes. Anne’s idea had taken root and bloomed into a plan. They rose to their feet. Wilson’s hand went to his square bib collar. His mouth opened and a prune-dark flush spread over his cheeks.

  Their skirts made soft brushings, their heels were as knuckles on a midnight door as they filed into the aisle.

  They walked from the meeting house.

  “Remember, we cannot be punished,” Anne said, as the four women gathered by the well. And Mary saw that Anne, who would calmly argue doctrine with Reverend Cotton—a man of whom the pastor of Ipswich had said, “I am unfit to polish his slippers”—had evidenced, by trembling voice, the racing of her heart.

  Samuel learned to crawl, then pulled himself onto a chair.

  Sinnie made walking bands, attached them to his apron and took him to the dusty road where she held the bands like reins, calling out encouragement. It was a hot August day and Mary worked at a table near the open door, plucking a wild turkey—watching, smiling.

  Down in the marsh, children moved randomly as hens, their white collars glinting as they gathered horsetails and huckleberries. Far away, out on the mud flats, people dug clams, plucked periwinkles.

  And over them, clouds piled, golden edged.

  She gazed at the sky, her hands resting on the carcass. Surely ’tis a sign that the Lord doth bless our enterprise.

  William, now a freeman. And so he had been awarded land north of the peninsula at Rumney Marsh and he and Jurden had ferried cows across the Charles River. Corn, they had planted there, and salt-water hay. Last night, William had muttered over his accounts, pleased, placing a large order of Monmouth caps. Warm rain made elephant ears of her squash leaves.

  The Holy Spirit is within you …

  October.

  The leaves of apple trees turned to yellow leather and the marsh was a red-brown quilt. Pigeons spread over the sky like oil, their wings making a deafening clatter.

  Mary was pulling carrots in the garden, when Sinnie burst from the house.

  “Indians,” she panted. “They are passing, just now.”

  Mary swept up Samuel and they hurried to the corner of their street.

  Twenty-four Narragansett men walked down Corn Hill Road. They strode steadily, straight-backed, and did not look from side to side. They wore leather mantles hung with furs. Fringed, beaded leggings. Wampum glinted in black braids; ash patterned their cheeks. Deerskin clad, their feet made no sound.

  Before, and behind them—jingling and tramping, a regiment of musketeers.

  Mary and Sinnie waited until the men were out of sight and then followed, fascinated, their leather soles silent as the Narragansett’s deerskin. Other women came from doorways, stepped through gates. They did not speak to one another, as if the leaf-scented air was itself a flux binding peace and could be broken by the merest whisper. They gathered by the meeting house and watched the militia and the Narragansett milling beneath the tavern’s sign, two carved bunches of grapes creaking in the shadow-cooled wind.

  Governor Vane arrived, and the magistrates, and the ministers. English and Indians exchanged greetings—filed inside.

  “’Twas Miantonomi,” William told them, at supper. “The Narragansett sachem. We have made an alliance with them against the Pequots.”

  “Why?” Mary lowered her spoon.

  “Last month, an English bark sighted a ship filled with Pequot. The English attacked and killed those Indians who did not throw themselves overboard. They did find an old Englishman below-decks …” He lowered his voice. “Stark naked with his head cleft and his arms and legs cut, as though in the process of removal.”

  Mary thought of the road leading to the mainland, a finger of land so thin that it was covered with water at high tide.

  “For revenge, we burned two of their villages and spoiled their canoes,” William said. “There will be more. And worse.”

  Darkness had fallen and the crickets throbbed—feebler, now, a silvery scraping.

  SEVEN

  Unravellings - 1637

  MARY HUDDLED BENEATH THREE QUILTS and a deerskin.

  “What is it?” she said. William had been grim at supper, had muttered the prayer as if the words disgusted him. Now he lay on his back, arms crossed, not seeking sleep but watching the devilish dance of shadow on the walls. He had built a fire, for a late autumn storm swept down from the northeast.

  “Mr. Wilson,” he said. “That porridge-mouthed prick.”

  “William.”

  “Nay, Mary. If you knew.”

  “What, then?”

  “Am I doing my duty. Why is my wife not producing babies. Am. I. Doing. My. Duty. Pompous Cambridge ass. He would interfere in a man’s very bed.”

  Sleet pattered against the oiled paper.

  “Mr. Wilson will be seeking retribution for our actions,” she said. “When we walked from his insufferable sermon. You know that Anne was queried and she said we had cramp.”

  She looked up at him but he would not meet her eyes. Samuel was now two years old. Her flowers continued to arrive—full moon, crescent moon, new moon.

  “’Tis true, though,” she reasoned. “Although Mr. Wilson has the wrong reason for it—in fact, we have no new babe.”

  She pushed herself up onto the bolster beside him. He rolled, gathered her, pressed his lips to her hair. She heard the yipping of foxes.

  “They are hungry,” she murmured. “Looking for hens.”

  She felt William’s body relax as he slipped towards sleep but she had been quickened to wakefulness by his words.

  Porridge-mouthed prick.

  “Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps the Lord doth punish me.”

  She felt the steam of his breath.

  So many confusing things. Loving too much, or not enough. Her agile hungry mind. Her questi
ons. Her pride.

  “Nay,” William said, yawning. “I do not think so, Mary, for then he would have punished me too and he has not. Our crops did prosper. I am a freeman. We are in good health.”

  “He doth test us, perhaps.”

  “Because of the controversy and our part in it?”

  “Aye.”

  But our reasons differ, she thought. Faith and politics. Both make a wedge that cleaves the colony.

  Mary curled against William. She sought prayer but instead remembered finding a grass snake, last summer, trapped beneath a rock, lashing from side to side. From pity, she had lifted the stone. Underneath, lying on the cold soil, had been an enormous milk snake with the smaller serpent in its mouth—half-swallowed.

  In January, a Fast Day was called to mourn, and mend, the colony’s dissension. John Wheelwright had been invited up from Mount Wollaston to give the sermon.

  We are like sheep, Mary thought, glancing up. Winter sheep, huddled upon the moor.

  Woollen hoods, capes, greatcoats—grey, black, goldenrod yellow, pokeberry red, squared on men’s shoulders, draped over women’s heads. January light gleamed on the men’s white collars; their garments exuded the tinge of pipe smoke. Women and girls set their feet on foot stoves, filled with hot coals; men’s calves were thickened by heavy, gartered stockings.

  She felt her ribs curve round the gnawing cave of her stomach. They had eaten nothing since last night’s supper. She glimpsed Governor Henry Vane, seated near the front. He bent in prayer, blonde curls and gloved hands covering his face. He wore gloves like those William had sold in London—blue kid, with a pattern of seed-pearl lions and long gauntlets of brushed suede.

  Wheelwright gathered his papers, mounted the steps and stood beneath the sounding board that overhung the pulpit. He laid his hands on either side of a cushioned Bible.

  At least half of the people in the meeting house are Anne’s followers. They think to appease us. They hope her brother-in-law will calm the troubled waters.

  Wheelwright waited until only the distant plaint of gulls could be heard.