A Measure of Light

by Beth Powning

  “Listen,” she said. “The Lord is with us. Remember Psalm 71—‘Be thou to me a rock of refuge, a strong fortress, to save me, for thou art my rock and my—’ ”

  The words were cut short by a passionless animal shriek. She looked over her shoulder into the black night, cleared her throat, finished the verse.

  Curled between William and Sinnie, Mary lay awake listening to random crepitations—an acorn’s fall, shiver of twigs. The eerie shriek came closer; then she heard the first notes of the wolves’ chorus.

  Dear Lord, she began, and could not continue, as if forbidden. If she had not been pressed between husband and servant, she would have risen and walked into the darkness, towards the alluring, mournful song.

  After seven days’ march—filthy, irritable with fatigue—they straggled into Providence, a collection of houses wedged between a river and a high hill. Roger Williams answered their knock, stood with a broad smile, wiping food from his mouth with a cloth. Some stayed at his home, others were billeted with families or went to the tavern. They bathed their raw, calloused feet, ate mutton stew, and slept indoors between sheets smelling of lavender.

  —

  On a fine April day, they set sail down Narragansett Bay, travelling past wooded shores and small islands. At sunset, their boat drifted into a channel that snaked through tall, nest-rich grasses. They embarked on a soggy bank.

  “Pocasset,” William said. “As it is called by the Narragansett.” The island had been purchased from the natives. The chief sachems, Canonicus and Miantonomi, had received forty fathom of white beads and the other inhabitants had been given ten coats and forty hoes—as part of the purchase, they had been required to leave.

  There were no houses. Felled trees were strewn about burned stumps.

  The women were silent. Mary had imagined it as a Yorkshire valley, with a village of thatched cottages.

  They stood listening to the throb of tree frogs, the rustle of reeds.

  In warm morning rain, Mary and Sinnie and the other women and their children gathered rocks. They lugged them in baskets, clattered them in heaps. Over the next days, hearths and chimneys sprouted from the muddy soil. The men cut green saplings and drove them into the earth, bent them around the hearths in the shape of bread loaves. They lashed bark or sailcloth over the frames.

  Inside their English wigwam, Mary and Sinnie spread reeds on the ground, put their packs and bundles along the walls, set a cooking pot on the crude hearth.

  Mary went to bed with aching back, her hands curled like an old woman’s in the shape of stones.

  All night long, the wolf howls rose, quavered, faded away into silence and then recommenced.

  William sat, listened, lay back down. Mary buried her head in his armpit. Vinegar, damp wool.

  “We shall destroy them,” he murmured into her ear. “Sleep, you are safe.”

  III.

  AQUIDNECK ISLAND

  1638–1651

  Vain hopes are cropt, all mouths are stopt, sinners have naught to say …

  “The Day of Doom”

  MICHAEL WIGGLESWORTH

  TWELVE

  Pocasset - 1638–1639

  A FLOCK OF RED-WINGED BLACKBIRDS swept down like a wind-tossed shawl, bending the rushes with their slight weight.

  Mary stood in the doorway of their new house. Spring. Its energy in the kindly light, its buds and birds; so simple, it seemed. The green slopes around the cove were cut and torn by the wheels of oxcarts; her eye was drawn less to the land than to the square shapes enforced upon it, where the village of Pocasset grew. The air rang with the thud of mallets, the creak of wheels and whinnying of horses. Behind her, the settled state of their own house—a fire on the hearth and a quilt-mounded bedstead—made her wish that it were not finished; its construction had crowded her daytime mind and graced her with the sleep of exhaustion. She had peeled bark, dug postholes, lugged water. And she had been wearied by the gruelling walk from Boston; the exigencies of their first crude hut; the wolf slaughter, when they had been so beset that the Narragansett had come to their assistance, hurling an injured doe into a pit, bidding the men corral the wolves and the women to cower in their hovels.

  She leaned against the doorframe. An image filled her mind and she pressed palms to eyes. It hovered, always, sometimes sweeping over her with such force that she cried out, or dropped kettles—part fowl part fish part beast, holes like mouths, horns, no toes but claws, talons, prickles …

  —

  Feet, slapping the packed soil. Running.

  Anne’s serving girl bent in the doorway, hand to ribs.

  “Prithee, Mistress Dyer,” she said, gasping. “Anne’s time has come.”

  A young preacher trained in medicine stood at the bedside, bloody hands hanging. Anne lay with bare legs spread, clutching her shift. Eyes closed, she cried out as a quivering, jelly-like mass slipped onto the bedding.

  Gooseberries, Mary thought. Numb, she looked on without understanding.

  “She hath lost consciousness,” the young man said.

  Several weeks later, Mary and Anne sat in a doorway, stripping pinfeathers from mallards. Northwards, they could see the bright timbers of new houses as the settlement grew. Behind them, in the single room of the Hutchinsons’ new house, Anne’s daughters worked at the hearth.

  “I have heard,” Anne said.

  She had lain near death for days. Now colour bloomed in her cheeks and her prodigious energy had returned.

  “They say that the young minister wrote to John Cotton of my miscarriage. Cotton did tell Governor Winthrop. Now, they say the news has spread far and wide. ‘Anne Hutchinson, too, hath birthed a monster.’ Ah, but mine was not one, like yours, Mary, but thirty! ‘Each a different shape!’ Winthrop doth proclaim. As I brought forth thirty misshapen opinions, he says, so I must bring forth thirty ‘deformed monsters.’ ”

  She secured a feather between thumb and butterknife, gave a violent pull. Then she slapped down the knife.

  “I do not care,” she snapped.

  Mary, startled, looked up. Anne had maintained her equanimity throughout her house arrest and trial; now, it seemed, this final outrage was as the flooding of spring tides.

  “I feel the same for myself as I did for you,” Anne said. “I am a lily in the sight of God. I do not feel sullied by what came forth from my womb. ’Tis only that I am too old to be bearing children.”

  Mary tugged at a stubborn feather.

  “Of course, you are young,” Anne said—considering, amending. “Your next babe will be perfect, I am certain. I do believe you are graced, Mary. Your baby was …” She broke off, brooded. “Perhaps ’twas a message for Mr. Cotton, warning him of his weaknesses. Or for Governor Winthrop himself. God chooses his methods, we cannot understand.”

  Mary did not answer. She heard in her teacher’s voice a veiled impatience. With her. With her obdurate grief, darkness, despair. With the entire subject, which sapped time better spent on the building of Pocasset.

  “Perhaps ’twas nothing more than a misstep of nature,” Anne added, glancing at Mary. “Such as mine. Such as you see in a pig’s litter.”

  Mary bent forward over a basket, shaking feathers from her hands, suddenly furious, thinking that Anne understood theology, but not friendship. She trampled upon the heart’s seeded soil.

  “Do you not remember?” Mary said. She heard the harshness that frequently, now, edged her own voice. “I did lose my first boy. In London. My first perfect boy, William, who lived but three days. Then Samuel came, another perfect boy. And then …” She threw up her hand, her mouth warped. “How can I not think that this was intended for me?”

  Teach me, she wanted to cry. Give me the answer.

  She looked away, out over the bay, where a shallop headed out to the fishing grounds. Anger towards Anne was an unwanted glimpse into vacancy, where once had been trust.

  —

  Spring yawned into hot summer.

  At low tide, Mary and Sinnie
picked periwinkles along the shores of the cove. Sinnie—blonde hair like thistledown, pumpkin-yellow petticoats and red stockings revealed in the breeze. Samuel—a pudding cap, quilted. He trailed Sinnie, holding her skirt, then letting it go in order to squat, his tiny fingers plucking. Mary watched them.

  I should be happy.

  She lifted a mat of bladderwrack. Beneath, clinging to the rock, were the innocent snails, their tender cream-coloured feet clinging.

  William was busy, preoccupied. As clerk, he attended frequent meetings with Coddington, now Judge Coddington, and three elders. As surveyor, he allotted plots of land with strokes of his quill. He was appointed to deal with the Indians in the matter of venison procurement. He named men as sergeants or corporals of the train band; he disposed monies from the treasury, made laws and memoranda—all “according to God.”

  He feels a kind of exultation, she thought. Power, thinking to improve upon such laws as were imposed in Boston. Freedom.

  She watched Sinnie and Samuel, who had moved farther out on the mudflats. Beyond them, small waves quivered, running under the sky, tossing the light. She lowered herself to a rock and sat with arms round her basket, pressing it to her belly.

  “I say merely that a person may have direct communion with God. How doth that interfere with the ‘running of this colony’?” Anne sat on a high-backed chair, hands clasped as if for restraint and her eyes hunting the men’s.

  Mary sat beside William on a bench beneath the Coddingtons’ parlour window, which was open to the sound of rain on the pond across the road and the smell of autumn leaves. Across the stippled water, maples drifted in mist, a red cloud.

  The men exchanged glances. Wil Hutchinson was no longer so proud of his Anne, Mary thought, seeing his eyes lower. She saw her own William’s fingers drum his knee, knew he wished to be home on this wet day, for there was still work to be done before the coming of cold. Judge Coddington, however, held Anne’s stare. He had been Boston’s wealthiest merchant and had built its only brick house; yet from the time of Anne’s arrival in the colony he had never stopped supporting her.

  “We must needs have unity of purpose,” Coddington said, exasperated. “As would any new enterprise, be it colony, business, or church.”

  “I am tired of the interference of government in the affairs of people and religion,” Anne snapped. “I am opposed to magistrates.”

  “How would you have us keep order, then?” Coddington exclaimed. “Punish the riffraff? Control drunkenness, thievery, all the evils to which society is prone? You would set us one against the other.”

  Again. Again.

  Anne set her jaw, held his eyes.

  Without her, Mary thought, there would have been no rebellion. No diaspora. And thus, no Pocasset. She longed to be buoyed by such passion of conviction, as she had felt long ago in London when she had first beheld Anne’s cool, intransigent eyes. She did not know, now, if she followed Anne from habit, envy, or fear.

  “You exhibit arrogance, Mr. Coddington,” Anne snapped. “You hold that you are of the aristocracy and that we are not. You wish for control over my spiritual as well as my temporal life. I have gathered a few families around me. Hereafter, I will hold my own church and will nevermore set foot in yours.”

  She rose, sought her work basket. She strode from the room without waiting for her husband.

  Wil Hutchinson made a helpless gesture, as if appealing for leniency.

  Mary saw Anne pass beneath the window. Into the silence came the voices of children, jumping from rock to rock laid out on the road, taunting when someone missed their footing: “Poison, poison!”

  Sinnie curled on a pallet by the hearth. Moonlight cast shadows, the windows were opened to the shrilling of peepers.

  They forget that I am here.

  Murmurs, then hisses. Then—loud voices.

  “… my teacher.”

  “… not to go. I am the Clerk, how would it …”

  “And she is my friend. We followed her here, William.”

  “… other reasons …”

  Sinnie sat upright, pulled the blanket around her shoulders. The lazy-eyed embers warmed her face. Ashes were gritty beneath her bare heel.

  Fighting over words. For they do both breathe the same air as one another, eat the same stew. Feel the same sunshine.

  “I believe in direct communication.”

  “Do you? Have you received such?”

  A crabbit tone. He gets above himself. He asked for me to slickstone his ruff.

  She waited for Mary’s answer. She did not understand the question but realized it had brought the fight to a halt.

  Be she weeping? I would go to her, oh, that I could go to her …

  “I cannot come anymore.”

  They stood beside a rail fence. Cow pies in the lane were crisp, flaky. Corn hung on dried stalks and boys carried armloads of firewood into sheds.

  Mary raised her eyes to Anne’s sun-browned, wry face.

  “William forbids it.”

  Their eyes met with a rebounding, as arrow striking steel.

  William forbids it.

  “Do I fail you, Mary?” Her tone was a plait of threat, sarcasm, wonder.

  Yes, Mary wished to say, but did not.

  The word had no place in the clarity of island autumn when each thing—falling apple, migrating birds, passing whales—had its truth and sequence.

  William had called them outside, noticing a smudge on the full moon. He held his son, bundled in quilts. Mary put an arm around Sinnie, hugging her close for warmth. Crisp shadows lay across the snow.

  The smudge grew, slowly veiling the bright face.

  “Now ’tis like bloody egg yolk,” Sinnie whispered.

  Trees, houses, boulders faded into the maw of blackness as the snow ceased to shine.

  “What does it mean, Mistress?” she whispered.

  Mary had grown weary of signs and their interpretation. She turned to William. His eyebrows lifted, relief replacing a new and unpleasant shiftiness in his face, the mask of ambition.

  “We will not stay here,” he said. “’Tis clear enough even without this. Coddington has told me he wishes to leave. He has no interest in sharing rule with Anne and her people. He is sick of dissent. As am I.”

  In April, William returned from an exploratory trip down the western side of Aquidneck Island. He paced the hearth as he gave his report.

  “There is a natural harbour, but around it the land is swampy. We will cut trees, and burn them, and dump the ash and wood on the swampy ground. Then we’ll haul in sand and dirt. And gravel. The Narragansett have offered to help, for payment.”

  She sat at the table swirling fiddleheads in a bowl of water, skimming the dried, woolly scales floating on the surface. Although it was their second spring on Aquidneck Island, she did not plant peas, nor set Jurden to manure the gardens, nor bid Sinnie deep-spade the carrot patch.

  She felt William’s excitement but was not infected by it. He was invigorated by challenge, whereas she and Sinnie anguished over what to take and what, once again, to leave behind. And in any event, she did not care whether they stayed in Pocasset or moved down-island, and despaired over the fact that William was so intent upon his goals that if he thought of her state of mind, it was only to dismiss it as a phase, transitory as the moon’s warning veil.

  She wondered if she would ever again see Anne.

  With whom will I share my thoughts? Discuss the Book of Martyrs or Latin grammar? Engage in theology or talk of communion with the Holy Spirit?

  That night, William extinguished the candle and lay upright against the bolster.

  He is not preparing for sleep.

  He rolled towards her and found her face in the darkness, slid fingers into her hair.

  “Many children, Mary,” he whispered. “Sons and daughters. Samuel doth grow lonely.”

  Always, his hands described her to herself. Belly, waist, the insides of her thighs. His lips sought her nipples, unleashing n
eed, need, so urgent. His pleasure, still, waited upon hers.

  Afterwards, she lay with arms outflung, eyes open, legs spread, savouring the respite from sadness.

  Love. So fierce. No words for it.

  Beyond.

  Mary and Sinnie sat on the hearth, knitting.

  “You do not wish to go, Sinnie?”

  Sinnie quirked her eyebrows at her tipping needles.

  “I am tired of moving, mistress.”

  Mary laid down her work.

  “I am, too,” she said.

  Samuel had turned three in December. Today he had a cold and had tired himself playing outside in the crisp air. He lay sleeping in the trundle bed.

  “You be like mother to me,” Sinnie observed. “Mother and sister both.”

  Mary looked up, acknowledged Sinnie’s intention with a smile.

  “My friendship with Anne hath faltered,” she said. “So I feel lonely, for there were things we talked of that I cannot discuss with anyone else. And I do feel … I do feel as if there is no life inside of me. On the brightest day of sunlight, my spirits do not lift.”

  “Aye.”

  “I feel abandoned by God. If such is true, I see no reason for my life. I am like rock. Or dirt. Or dog.”

  “I love rocks and dirt and dogs,” Sinnie protested, and then blushed. She set down her knitting to pluck a twig from the yarn.

  “Oh, Sinnie.” The wind rose. Mary looked out the window, saw a shudder run across the waters of the cove.

  Sinnie spoke again. “Those that tell of your baby and say you are bad because of it … they are bad, they are the cruel ones. Winthrop and those ministers. And those gossiping women. I do believe …”

  “What? I truly wish to know, Sinnie, for t’will help.”

  “I think you be the best person I know. If a bad thing was within you, it was not your badness.” She lowered her voice. “Sometimes I feel sorry for the creature. It did not wish to be so formed.”