The bodies of the warriors were missing as well. I supposed them to have been borne away to be buried, seated in pits with bows and beads. For when the English pilgrimed to Cape Cod some seventy years before, they dug up several Indian graves in uncouth curiosity and found the tenants seated, heads bent to knees.
I wanted none of this. I wanted nothing that was in my mind. Only this: I wanted to know that those who were mine had been saved, and that I could find them in this life. The shade of grief enveloped me. The lithe, leopard ferocity of the wilderness grinned at me from the trees. Though the sun’s eye bore down, my skin felt chilled, and I trudged around the foundations in a darkness invisible to eyes. I myself was the wild cat-of-the-woods, uselessly chasing my own tail as I circled the base of stones, though not in play. Dragging the blanket sling and sealskin, I made every inch of the circuit. I was fierce—or there was something fierce in me, tearing me—and would have leaped on sorrow and ripped it to pieces if we mortals could destroy what stirs us up and makes us mad with desolation.
The face of the Mi’kmaq came into my thoughts, and the threads of his hair that still seemed to hold a sparkle of life; I hated him and was helpless to do otherwise. Sobs choked me, stole my breath. Soon I could hardly tell whether I hated him for what he and others had done or whether, indeed, I hated him for showing me that I, too, seethed with rage. In me turned something murderous—a shadow from the wing of a dark bird.
Fury might have set me alight to burn until the ash of me blew away in the wind. Because all I ever learned of the civil wars of England and the struggles of the ancients told me that hatred destroys and that anger means chaos.
Even the outbuildings were razed, burned to the very earth, leaving only scorch marks and blackened shafts of wood.
I alone was left to the company of a thousand thousand trees and the trampled fields and the smoke going up to the heavens like a bad offering.
They have all gone into the world of light.
Light! Yet I could not bear to think of my mother and father with the boys and Mary and the rest in the regions of death that seem such an unknown—a darkness—to the living.
In my extremity, I wanted to die and be with them. I did not wish to press on and needle a way through the pathless places that lay at every compass point around me. What I wanted was to cease earthly awareness, to fly wholly from the horror that bent my back and tripped me so that I was knocked to my knees again and grasped at the weeds as though I drowned on dry land and reached for any help, even the little roots and leaves of plants.
My mind with all thought was overthrown for a time, shoved away from me by wildness and grief. I was not myself, or not as I was before. My spirit seemed to drift out of my body and float upward toward the burning disk of sun. I looked down with pity upon myself, at the fingers gripping the stems of grasses, at the bent shape of my form with the blanket and the silvery skin cast aside, at the unkempt hair spilling down my back.
I heard a voice that sounded like Father’s calling out, I will not fail thee, neither forsake thee, and my spirit sank back into the body below. I knew the verse and the words that came after: So that we may boldly say, The Lord is mine helper, neither will I fear what man can do unto me. Even now, I believe that without those words, my soul would have spiraled up toward the sun and jumped through that bright door and been glad to go from the world and not return, burned clean of sin and ill memory. In Boston, I had heard of many wonders of the invisible world, stories of the newly dead in England appearing on the day of their great change to a long-separated brother or sister in our own colony of Massachusetts Bay. Remarkables were ever occurring. Nothing was accident. The smallest act mattered. So our ministers taught, and so I had learned. The world was crammed with signs and messages, if only we had the wit and discernment to see, mark, and read. Wisdom revealed a voice murmuring in the leaves, cursive in the running streams, and sermons compacted in the bright veins of stones. God or Satan could speak out of the mouths of infants. Saving providences stood shining around us as beacons and messages. Yet the ink-black, gleaming magics of the Devil’s wrath were also a script written into the world.
Now I did not know whether the voice I heard was my father’s, though he read to us morning and night and would have sent me a word of comfort if he could, sailing across the river between death and this life, reminding me that a child of God can never be alone, though she can forget. We are always forgetting. It is our nature to forget and fall away. Possibly it was the voice of a passing angel, comforting me with my father’s tones and weeping for the world that goes on murdering Abel still, and sorry to see me in such a plight.
Sitting up, I gasped at the air, tasting smoke and flowers.
What am I to do? My little commonwealth—everyone who ever loved me and wished my safety—is gone.
The reply came to me as if I were still divided in twain—it seemed to come from a distance, as if my spirit were not quite married again to the body.
You must get up on your legs. You must walk to Fort Loyall. It is not so far. You can walk there on your own feet, and be there by evening, or in morning.
I obeyed myself. I stood.
I shouldered the blanket sling, letting it slide down into place and knotting the cloth tighter at my hip.
In that manner, setting one foot in front of another, I bowed to my fate and left that place where everything I had ever loved was murdered or stolen away from me. I hardly flinched when I passed by the other sites in our little settlement, the dwelling-houses all burned to the foundation stones, scorched and blackened. They had been empty for several days, the inhabitants fled to Fort Loyall. Another day or two and we would have done likewise. But we had waited too long and thought too highly of our fortified house. And now our name and place had been obliterated.
To meditate long on even the most abominable and detestable events is impossible. Weariness takes us and strips away thought and puts us into a sleep to shield us from what has occurred. I had not been departed from the house site but half an hour when I started from a sort of walking daze, alerted by a low ruttling in the forest.
Alarm passed through me like a flaming arrow and was utterly quenched. I had left much of my caution behind at the house and needed to be reminded that the world was perilous, and that a Frenchman or Indian might be hidden behind any stand of leaves. Too much affliction is like a potion that, for a time, makes the heart slow to scare, unable to throb in fright.
Sometimes I believe that if a Mi’kmaq had appeared, eager to club me over the head, I would have knelt and let him do his bloody work without resistance or any attempt to appease his wrath. I might even have thought such yielding to be an act of prudence and good judgment. Like Abraham’s son Isaac in the land of Moriah, I was ready to bear the fardels to my own burning. Death was an occasional visitor to our street back in Boston, but I had not seen his face for several years; not even a stillborn child or an uncle’s slip from the roof had come to us near Falmouth. Now, suddenly, we were terribly familiar with each other.
After letting the blanket and sealskin slip to the ground, I held still and listened, but it was several minutes before the sound came again. It was close and appeared to be the noise of an animal. I did not suspect some New World dragon or leopard-panther of the woods, but more likely the blowing and snorting of deer. I moved slowly between the trees, wondering if I was right, wondering if Providence was with me today, Christ on the mercy seat pitying my poor estate and grieved at the cruelty of men that will go ever on until God whispers finis to the world and makes the new heaven and earth.
Why did I feel the need to know? My decision not to flee seems peculiar and without wisdom.
I flitted back and forth between the trees, now hearing the noise at one place, now at another, and frequently glanced back to make sure I didn’t lose sight of where I had been. But at last I came to the edge of a stream where a tree, the great work of centuries, had burst toward the forest floor, leveling many large but les
ser trunks. Here the sky shone brightly through a gap in the forest. I ducked beneath the boles that lay one astride the other like mad, mighty bridges running from one nowhere to another nowhere, and looked about me.
“Hortus!”
How strangely a human voice clangs on our ears in the deep forest when no one seems near! And yet the word was only my own, eagerly ringing out.
Our Lincolnshire black—so my father called the gelding because he was a sturdy horse with the white stockings of the old breed, though he might not have been English at all—was standing in a deep pool below the lacy white frills where a stream tumbled over ledges, and never did I find water with its fine meanders and laughing over stones to be as beautiful as at that moment. He lifted his head and surveyed me and knew me.
I smiled for the pleasure of gazing at him and for the hour that turned more golden than before, the beams of sun growing intense and gilding Hortus with its rays.
“Hortus. Hortus, come to me,” I called softly.
He dipped his head to the water and drank before moving down the stream, his head rocking. I reveled in the sight of something saved from the mayhem of the day past. His legs splashed in the water. I could see right through the current to the pebbles underneath, and the jocund sunlight struck sparks from the water. As if in a mirror-glass, I glimpsed another world of gay-colored agates and purest clarity and playful stars.
Bending low, I crept under a trunk and scrambled over a wedge of stone to gain the brink.
“Hortus, Hortus.” I found myself again in tears and reached for his neck. The anvil of his head nudged against me, and he blew air shudderingly from his nostrils.
“I must have sensed that you were something good for me and not some wild beast,” I told him.
His lips mumbled at the stream. When he caressed me with the side of his head, I reached for the unfamiliar reins. “Who put this on you?”
The simple bridle was not leather but a fine basket weave of some unfamiliar sort, the brow- and nose-bands dyed with red ochre. “And where did you toss the horseman?”
I swept a hand over his side, noticing a streak of yellow earth on his haunches.
“Hortus, what an adventure you must have had,” I said. “Did someone ride you bareback into the woods? And where is he?”
I whirled and stared behind me. The gloom of the trees beyond the glade did not answer, and Hortus kept the secret of his brief captivity among the warriors. Turning back, I seized the reins and bent his head to mine.
“Wait here for me. Stay. Stay.”
He snorted at me as I stepped slantwise, keeping my eyes on him. I climbed from the stream, hauling myself up by a root, and hurried to where I had dropped the sling and sealskin. Once or twice I felt affrighted that my way had vanished, but I looked over my shoulder at the spot too often to be truly lost.
“Hortus!” The sound of his name was all that connected us, once he was no longer in sight.
One worry often gives way to the next; having a fear that he would be gone on my return, I grasped my few worldly possessions in my arms and did not stop to arrange them.
“Hortus, Hortus—”
In the clearing where the higgledy-piggledy trees were jackstraws for giants’ play, Hortus lifted his head and glanced at me, asking, I guessed, why I called his name so often. I set down my burden on a log and went to him.
“My flower, my black-shining sun, my sweet garden of silk,” I said to him, and petted his nose. “Let us gallop away. We can find out some paradise with a wall around it, one where no arrows and spears can pierce the air, and where the orchard trees are ever in lusty fruit and bloom, and the springs jet forth as crystal fountains.”
Hortus must have agreed with me because he nodded his head and blew air in gusts from his nostrils. And though he was but a beast, I could not bring myself to tell him how our family had melted away, and that my father, mother, and brothers might never ride him again. Nor would any of my kin mount his back. And no Onesimus or Blue Jonas would ride to the fort. Mary’s face rose up before me, her eyes closed. To say the words of those raw losses: I could not. An unexpected tear launched from my face and plummeted into the stream.
Once, long ago in Boston, I had asked Mother if we would meet a centaur in the forest. She laughed at me but then shrugged and said, “Who may say? Perhaps. Would you be afeared to see such a marvel?”
“No, I would be glad, so glad!”
“Are centaurs not wild?”
“But not Chiron. He was wise and a master of medicines.”
Now, years later, I knew the alphabet and many words in Greek and had translated a few lines about Apollo and the Daphnean tree, as well as a passage concerning the views of Democritus on the nature of atoms, air atoms being light and whirling, fire atoms sharp and light, interlocking iron atoms hard, and water atoms sliding-slick. My father said that I might be the only girl in the colony who knew any jots and smatterings of the ancient languages, for he set me to learning with my brothers, though never could I study before I had finished my house chores and stitched for an hour.
What was the use of acquiring a minim of Greek and a little more Latin when we were so far from England and culture? And yet study had proved sweet to me and, indeed, to all my brothers, though they could be marvelous complainers at times.
“Hortus.”
I led him from where he had lingered, cooling his legs in the stream, over to the jumble of downed trees. Holding up the sealskin, I let him smell the unfamiliar scent. He backed away, snorting, but after some sweet talk let me drape it over his back.
“I might have left the hide, Hortus, but now I am full glad that I did not,” I told him. “That was a blessing.”
After climbing onto a slanted trunk, I tied the blanket about me and reached for the horse. The skin would make a slippery saddle. I did not wish to slide off and strike the ground or trees and suffer injury, no one around to help.
“Come here,” I coaxed Hortus, tugging at the reins. “Come closer to me. Show me your smooth ride. Show me your country-gait.”
Not until he was pressed against the tree did I mount and straddle his back, warm and wide and lofty in the air. Now I regretted not stripping the Mi’kmaq of his sturdy leg coverings, for I had no care to be a lady of the wilderness. First tucking up my gown until my draggled-down stockings and bare legs showed, I tapped him with my heels and drew his head to the left with the reins.
“The land past Round Marsh, between the Casco River and Back Cove. Fort Loyall,” I told him. “That’s where we need to be. You’ve been to Falmouth before, more often than I have. If only I could prevail on you to tell me the easiest way to travel there. But we will find the stockade together.”
And that was how Hortus and I, Charis, left the woodsy-wild regions west of Fort Loyall and ventured east in search of succor and haven. It would have been fine if rest and safety proved all my story. I should have had the brave tale of a wander through dainty hillocks and goodly groves, with a firm confidence in what I would discover at the stockade, and without my heart changed to iron in my breast. But the way to Fort Loyall was for me a passage through memories. When my ride went well enough, I could not help poring over what I would wish to forget, the scorched foundation stones, the smoking shapes in the cellarage, all family vanished, and Mary dead, her body waiting for someone to come with a mattock and spade. When I grew alarmed, I could not help picturing the Mi’kmaq and the arrows in his fine-woven quiver. He had not come to our settlement alone.
Despite Hortus being an easy ride, sure-footed, a bit stiff-backed but easy in his gait, I am afraid that we mistook the direction for a time and circled about uselessly, for the sky was exchanging its colors not long after we passed Round Marsh, north of the ferry at Brim-hall’s Point, and wove our way through the forest along Back Cove, southwest of Sandy Point. Staying close to the sound of the sea, I missed the windmill and the Half Moon garrison, resolving to progress southeast, leave Hortus in trees, and aim for the cluster
of streets along the Casco River.
“Soon you will hide, Hortus,” I told him. “And I will just see if all is well ordered. I will come back for you, and then there will be something savory to eat for us both, and straw for you and a bed for me.”
Although I had no reason to mislike the help I might find at the fort, I seemed to have lost faith in men and their assistance. The smell of wood smoke alternately alarmed and reassured me. Where there was smoke, kettles and spits meant supper. Yet where there was smoke, there might be greater fires. I found myself questioning every possible step, every thought that drifted into mind. Had I not been taught that though God knew and destined all before the globe and stars were hatched, yet the depravity of man cut him off from the divine? It could not be wise to trust in those I did not know well, or in strangers.
“But who is not a stranger? Only you, Hortus,” I told him.
Hortus moved steadily beneath me, and there was nothing alien or monstrous or satanic about him. His flesh and hide wrapped a spirit that neither fretted about his salvation nor clung to remorse. His low nickering and occasional snort was conversation enough for me. I was glad to have his strength to join with mine.
I leaned forward to pat the horse’s neck. “We must take care, my lovely Hortus. And you must be noiseless, or someone may pirate you away from me.”
I was grateful that horses tend to be fairly quiet animals. My thoughts flashed here and there, swerving from the burned house to the fort ahead to, absurdly, the thought of riding a giant cockerel, for just such a strangeness happened in one of Goody Waters’ German tales. Startled, the bird might have betrayed me with a shrill note or tried to crow the sun up and over the dark edge of the world! Hortus gave his head a toss, as if to bring me back to him and shake away fancies. The mortal mind shelters strange whims, flittering and never controlled, flying where they will.
Charis in the World of Wonders Page 5
