My flighty mind, so often thinking of the curious and even silly when I should be serious and reverent, darted straight to a memory of Boston, and how after some indulging in beer and funeral cakes, Weaver Turell lost his footing in the rain and tumbled into his mother’s grave. I was young enough to forget, but I had older brothers who occasionally reminded one another and laughed heartily at the memory.
“You would be blessed if you lived so long and usefully and died in such a state of grace as old Goody Turell,” our mother told Joseph when she caught him telling the tale.
“Yes, I know. . . but it is comical.”
“Joseph, you saucebox,” she said, and then smiled, though later in the day she bade him to think on his own spiritual estate.
The memory brought up more tears that made the green room soften and wave. My mother had always been unfailingly kind (if there were moments otherwise, I have a pardonable memory and have forgotten them), and unlike many I have known in Massachusetts who were ever disquieted and uneasy about the destiny of their souls, she put her confidence in Christ’s mercy and bid us do the same.
The weight adjusted, I picked up the clay bottle that I meant to fill with water. Out of weariness, I had not searched for the stream before, but when I woke in the night, I heard a liquid, silvery song and knew it played and rambled close by.
I kissed my sister on the forehead and bade her body farewell, and clambered back through the branches of our green room.
The stream was my first stop. The day was still, and so I easily followed the sound of water. I clambered onto the wet stones to scoop from where it whirled fastest and freshest. Thirst had been plaguing me, and I drank until I could not swallow another mouthful, and afterward filled the bottle once more, plugging it with a wad of moss, all the while remembering Mary and how she would never thirst.
I was not sure whether safety meant rounding the fields and going as yesterday, or whether it might be better simply to plunge across without concern for the roundabout way. The morning before, I was intent on not being pursued to the hiding place. A direct course might have aroused attention and led the Mi’kmaq or their French leaders to us.
Now I felt anxious and stirred up about my family. I did not let myself examine my thoughts and situation too closely because I knew there would be nothing of comfort in them. No one had come to the hiding place, not the day before and not in the morning after the attack. I determined to head in a straighter path for the house, keeping to the shadows as best I could. This slender plan meant that I would be completing a sort of jagged circle that looped from the house to the hiding place and back again.
My feet were sore, and I stopped often to drink from the bottle. But I never let myself pause for long. All my eagerness was to embrace my mother and father and brothers and whole family, to find out any dead or injured, and to do what I could to assist. I wanted to confess my carelessness, my angers, my sorrow. I wanted my mother’s arms and my mother’s forgiveness and comfort. And we would bring Mary home. She and I being the only girl-children among the cousins, her loss would be especially grievous to all.
“I am so sorry for not saving her, not protecting her,” I said aloud. The image of Mary, all deathly white in the green oval of the room, held place in my mind as I moved through the woods.
I sobbed now and then, partly because I was bruised from the rough, quick-paced walk on the day before, partly because of Mary and my own loneliness without her, and partly because of the dread that went along with me. When I wept, the tears seemed not proper mourning but jerked from my eyes with each footstep.
On the shore sometimes I remember seeing waves that were larger than the others, that seemed to hang in the air for instants before curling over and collapsing into foam. The fear in me was like one of those waves that seemed outside of time and holding still in the midst of change.
Only once did my fear break into a shout: it was no surprise, for do we not all prove mortal and as one in folly and dearth of mastery over our passions?
Intending to pass through a nigh-leafless but close-set thicket of high-bush huckleberries so that I might crouch in more secrecy and arrange my bundle, I stumbled and nearly fell, crying out in startlement so that my heart, grown so accustomed to shakings, set off running. But I stopped, staring down at the man who had tumbled down in the berry shrubs, leaving a broken, awkwardly-pruned gap.
Quivering, I bent and touched a finger to his arm. I placed my hand where I knew the blood in his throat should pulse but could feel nothing. I could not tell whether he or I ran hot or cold, my body felt so strange, betraying me with flush and chill like a fever. Fearing that I would slip and sprawl and kick in a swoon, as my brother John had done when gripped by an ague, I nerved myself to thrust at the man. He flopped heavily onto his back, glaring up at the sky as if a gaze could strike it like an arrow and bring down the heavens. At that, I felt he had passed far from us, for the dead are more unwieldy and clumsy in their movements than the living who must carry, strip, and wash them.
“Mother,” I whispered, wishing for any familiar form to appear and call my name.
What was I to do? The world, I thought, was proving a charnel house where many might need burying. But that would not be my work—this day mine was to live and return to my family. For without kindred we are prey to the world’s bears and panthers, wild or human.
The household might yet be under siege. Perhaps how to return to my own was still a puzzle-knot that only time could untangle.
As my heart eased in its drumming, I considered the dead man closely, concluding that I must search and see if there was anything I ought to take from him. I did not want to walk back to the green room where Mary’s body lay waiting. But what if I had to sleep out-of-doors another night or two? Of a surety, he had left his possessions behind on earth and would have no more need of them.
“Mi’kmaq. You are most probably a Mi’kmaq sort of Indian,” I whispered. Really, I knew little enough about the various tribes, but guessed from his clothes and from the accounts of travelers I had heard when visiting Fort Loyall. The French were luring the northern Mi’kmaq and Maliseet peoples of the Wabanaki to move against the English. All week, my uncles and father had been arguing about the right time to leave for the Falmouth fort. Well, we had judged that hour wrong. No one knows the instant of strange appearings, whether for good or ill.
Over the shoulders was draped something like a cloak, silky and smooth to my touch. I supposed it might have been the skin of a seal or perhaps some pale creature of the forest deeps, a unicorn or a leopard without spots. I was surprised that he had bothered with such a garment, yet it could be cold in May, and the skin would make a good bed for a traveler in the wilds. I could sleep in its shelter, I thought, and lifted the edge, which proved the skin to be heavy and thick. The Mi’kmaq (if so he was) wore sleeves attached to a kind of rough jacket, painted with red and yellow ochre and lashed front and back at the center with leather strings. Uneasily I wondered if I should undress him; I might find those garments useful on a chilly May night. Below the jacket were long deerskin breeches and a loose piece of hide tied to a kind of girdle. I drew back my hand. Those I did not want to touch.
Growing braver and untying several pouches, I shook the contents onto the ground. Inside one was a little quill-ornamented birchbark box containing a stitching awl, a long strip of leather, and sewing needles of bone and copper. I sniffed at another, packed with smoked smelt and shattered pieces of what I suspected to be dried herring.
“The life is more than meat, and the body is more than raiment,” I murmured.
Perhaps I was already, in some sad corner of my mind, planning on what to do if I proved entirely solitary in the world because I also determined to take his jacket and moccasins and some of the gear he carried—the pouches, the box with awl and needles.
Gingerly, I tugged at his sleeves. His eyes seemed to look into mine and then slide past; I sat back on my heels.
Though intend
ing to regard him with disgust as monstrous and condemned, I was surprised to find that his face appeared open and shorn of any anger. He was not repulsive in features—a straight nose, dark eyes and brows, and an impossibly sheer-falling spill of hair that I went so far as to handle. The gleaming strands felt alive in my fingers, and I dropped them hastily. Oil with a smear of red ochre made his skin shine. I wondered if he had been loping a long way from the lands to the north.
When pulling at the sleeves, I noticed that his hands and nails were grimy with gunpowder, and concluded that he may have owned but lost a musket and been left with only bow and arrows. The points were not knapped stone but iron—the treacherous trade gifts of the French. I was careful not to brush against the tips because I had heard a minister at Falmouth say that the forest was a storehouse for devilry, a pantry stocked with Indian poisons and a pharmacopoeia of maledictions. They might be tainted, and even a careless scratch could mean that poison could go sparking and sizzling through my veins.
Why did he care to travel so far just to attack a few settlers? Ransom monies to be had? The wiles of the French?
Mother always said that my main lapse in understanding was an inability to perceive the ill and warped in others, that I was only too likely to think well of all the world. Such an error could be my undoing, she warned me. Prudence and good judgment depended on an accuracy and clarity of sight. Lack of discernment would be as a moth hidden in my cape.
True, I could hardly detect the murderer inside the youth—it seemed to me that he was half a boy and half a man. My brothers had been toiling as men for a long time now, but at times they seemed boys, often playful and laughing when not at their labors. Perhaps it is entirely a mistake to believe that evil intents show like ochre on the skin or in the face.
Up in his home, far north, he probably fished and hunted for seal and perhaps even the mysterious whales that rose out of the sea with jeweled fountains crowning their heads and then slammed out of sight, down into the region of the Leviathan and the monstrous, pearly octopus. Perhaps he felt how wondrous and strange the world is when he floated on the sea. He might have speared the very seal—for I had decided that the silvery pelt must belong to a seal—whose skin became the robe over his shoulders, or thrown a net after smelt, or stabbed larger fish from a birchbark canoe. Those arrows in the cleverly dyed and woven quiver must properly be meant for elk and bears in the woods near the coast, and not for us; it was those whore-master rogues, the French, who had turned the Indians against us, or so Joseph once said, and earned a reproof for talking so loosely.
Jesuits wandered in the wilderness, converting the savages to their secret ways and their rituals that were said to be akin to magic, with their censing, indulgences, and silver and gold mice that were like tiny idols to ward off the plague—as is said of the precious mice of the Philistines in the First Book of Samuel—blessed on French altars and paraded through towns. I had heard tell of silver, gold, and porcelain hands and eyeballs left on Romish altars in thanksgiving after recovery from an illness. How I shivered, a heap of false body parts rising up in fancy! Somehow I could not blame the Mi’kmaq for yielding to the persuasion of the cunning-tongued, especially now that he was dead and so young that I could hardly fathom his being like one of those who knocked my aunt—which aunt?—over the head. Blood stained one cheek and was clotted in the dull-shining hair.
How did you die?
He had been shot not long before he collapsed among the huckleberries. Where the halves of his jacket met in the back, the ties hung down, and a pistol wound about the bigness of a coin was visible in the gap. When I shoved him onto his side and pulled the two pieces of the garment away, I found another great wound near the shoulder blade that made me wonder at his power, to suffer such injury and yet muster the strength to stagger on until he dropped in the huckleberries.
Yet soon I began once more to feel something like a horror of him, dwelling on how he might have killed someone of my own family in devilish hate or by terrible mischance, permitted by Providence. The darkness I had felt earlier crept over me. Here I sat so close beside him, and yet he would be forever swaddled in mystery, without a name or my having any sense of him save that he had come south in order to do evil with the French and with others of his kind. Not even his tribe was altogether sure to me: though I guessed him to be Mi’kmaq, one of the Wabanaki, even that was not certain. How little I could know of what had happened, until I found my kin! Shudders jolted me until I could not say whether I shook from May warmth or from May cold.
Time being such a strange fabric, slow or quick-spun, woven tight and small or loose and open, I was uncertain how long I had knelt in the thicket. A thread of longing for my own people pulled taut in me, and I hurriedly arranged my bundle. Grave-stuff the contents seemed to me, like relics from the old pagan barrows of England carelessly broken open by a plough.
I moved more quickly now, despite the weight of the unfamiliar sealskin pressing against my shoulders. It smelled of the young man’s far-off village, an odor of fish mixed with smoke from last winter’s fires and something less nameable, intimate, and almost fragrant. Perhaps it was the scent of his oiled skin. So the things of this world tell us a tale, though whether true or feigned, we never know.
My feet worked mechanically over the ground as my mind shuttled from the figure of the dead Indian to my family. Was he married? Did such people wed at all? Did he have a mother to grieve his disappearance? Who of my aunts had fallen by the door? Were survivors coming for me and Mary even now?
Too much thinking gave way to little thinking, and several times I found myself wandering out of my way. Then I searched the treetops for a clue and checked the direction to the settlement by the hazard of a guess.
But I was no newcomer to the place and its landmarks.
Once I dropped to my knees, stunned by a rush of fear. How long I held still, I cannot stay. At last, taking hold of a branch, I pulled myself onto my feet. Though weary, I set off again, determined not to rest again until I reached our cluster of houses.
That was a failed plan. My belly hurt, heavy with water from the stream. Before long I felt weak and insubstantial and stopped to eat the remainder of the ashcake and a piece of the Indian boy’s fish, strongly flavored and rich with oil. Afterward, I slumped down under the shade of trees. I imagined drifting into a drowse that would refresh and help me to go on but somehow could not sleep. I made myself rise and stumble away.
But my steps quickened when I came close enough to see a spiral of smoke that must be floating up from the chimbley. A skirmish meant that many hungry people to feed. And surely the distance was now not so very far. I trotted clumsily, eager to be with my family, but the soreness of my feet had nigh-lamed me and soon made me go on more slowly.
Where the edge of the forest curved around the field directly opposite the house stood a tall tree that my uncle Thomas said is called tamarack in the Algonquian tongue, and from there could be gained a full view of the clearing. I aimed toward that tree, keeping its top always before me, my thoughts stirring from their torpor.
Some sensations feel almost creaturely—good ones can be like a child curling up by a fire or like a kind, wish-granting stranger met at a crossroads, but ill ones are cannibal witches, creeping heavily beside us, coaxing us into the forest. And what are these wish-granting wayfarers and woods-witches, these beings no proper stay-at-home Englishwoman knows? Goody Waters of Boston knew and told me their stories. More than a century ago, her ancestors fled to Frankfurt during the bloody queenship of Mary, and one of them heard and passed down the crooked German stories of the place. I often dreamed of them, imagining a long ago when wishes could still come true, though I was scolded for such wastes of my time.
Now my mind felt as if some unseen companion was close at hand, one who meant no good to me. Any stranger nearby must have been flinty-hearted and bitter. Any creature at my heels must have been demoniac. My thoughts were shaded. Hellish daydreams crept into my h
ead, visions of crawling monsters, slithering upside down in the crevices of the underworld or sneaking into the light of sun in order to sting and scratch and whisper curses and threats into our ears.
The story of Mistress Rowlandson in the time of King Philip’s War came to me, and how the scene of her capture held “the lively resemblance of hell,” and how her small daughter died in her arms during the night, departing from her like a lamb in the midst of wolves. Wolves. And yet my father always declared that every human being showed forth the image of God, however marred. The remembrance comforted me and yet could not stop the sense that something shadowy scampered after me.
Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. The words jostled through my head.
I dashed the last stretch of ground to the tamarack, the blanket sling thumping against my hip. I lowered it, the heavy sealskin sliding from my soaked back at the same moment. Ducking under the lower branches, I dropped to my knees to survey the house and the yard before it.
The great trunk of chimbley still stood. Smoke curled up from within the stone base of what had been my house. I saw something, yet nothing that was a house or family.
“Mother,” I shouted to the air, and the air did not answer.
I rested my head against the trunk of the tamarack and wept.
A wave that was my own fear crashed down and drowned me in teardrops and in a tide of uselessness and helplessness to change what had been done.
Who can say how long such hours go on? They seem to drop into eternity. I cried, I thumped down and howled on my knees for what had departed, and did so without a care for who or what would hear me, and it did not come to me until later that perhaps some of my family lived, that perhaps some of them had escaped to Fort Loyall without me, or that others might have been taken by the Indians and could be ransomed by the money gifts of charitable souls in Boston.
Creeping nearer, I discovered that the ground near to the stone foundation of what had been the house felt warm through the leather soles of my shoes, so I slipped the moccasins over them. Here and there beams still smoldered and sent up fresh trails of smoke. Half-collapsed into the cellar, the rubble that remained was plainly much too hot to explore, though I took a stick and stirred about near foundered timbers, unsure what I saw. Was that rounded shape a skull or a burned pot, that form a blackened post or a body, that slender bar a bone or some charred spindle, the remains of my uncle Thomas’ carpentry?
Charis in the World of Wonders Page 4
