We traveled in dusk and near-silence for a time, following the irregular shape of Back Cove, shielded by forest land, until at last I moved eastward toward Falmouth, concluding that the settlement on the bay was quite close. In falling twilight, I recognized a cairn of heaped stones erected near Queen Street. Another would mark the start of a rutted path that wound some thirty feet to the top of the bluff; there stood the stockade with its black-mouthed cannon cocked toward land and sea. At the fort, I hoped to discover some of our neighbors and perhaps family. How glad I would be to see their faces!
“Already so inky,” I whispered. “Cimmerian seas.”
A shiver ran through Hortus, rippling his hide. I pressed the palm of my hand against his neck.
“You are the garden of the sea where water-chimeras under the surface stir the waves.” I wondered if the ocean had mermaids for gardeners and, if so, what sort of flowers grew in their deep, walled gardens.
“My mind is a whirligig of strange fancies,” I said to Hortus. “How can I dream anything but the dead?” I was reminded of Sabbath morning and afternoon sermons, and how thoughts wanted to wander.
“We must cling to the task,” I said, though I did not feel valiant.
A dense clump of trees seemed a likely place to leave Hortus and my few belongings. Determined to see what I could find out by my wits and nerve before committing myself to the unknown, I slid down from the horse, falling most of the way and landing hard on my knees. I felt for Hortus’ legs, steadied myself, and rose, my bones aching.
“Shhh,” I said, placing my hand on his muzzle.
He showed his teeth and seemed to be laughing. I slapped him lightly.
“Are you making mock of me?”
Leaving my few possessions close by, I kept only the knife and scissors, which I thought to fasten at my waist but ended up carrying in my hands. I took measure of the landmarks. A dead tree with a broken top reared above other trees. I would count my paces to the stockade wall and often glance over my shoulder, setting the changing aspect of the place in my mind.
Because I could not risk losing Hortus. And yet every step away from him meant hazard. Not braving the dark was also hazard. I should have left him closer to Back Cove. I should return to him, hide him. I should creep like a mouse to Captain Davis’ house. Unless I could be confused and too far southwest. . .but then I would reach Captain Tyne’s door, or even the Ingersoll garrison. No. I could not be so far.
When I paused, Hortus whinnied softly, and I called for him to hush.
My people have long believed that the night is frightful and no friend to human beings, who belong inside houses, away from outlandish noises and demon-dangers, but now I was half-glad to be hidden in its cloak. The lamp-bringer in the sky was firing the wicks of stars so that at each moment, new fire bloomed forth. On the ground, the dark ruled, and I was surprised by how little in the way of lights appeared—just one that seemed as if it burned in a high tower. Surely that lamp meant Fort Loyall.
Two hundred sixty-one, two hundred sixty-two, two hundred sixty-three. . .
After so many steps, I peered back, but the broken-topped tree had grown invisible in the darkness. The gloom was pitchier than I deemed right for a settlement with fort, and now a long, winding sheet of cloud smothered up the moon and a portion of the stars. The memory came to me of the prior year’s protests made by my father and others to Major Church and the General Court, that Falmouth remained in danger from Boston’s stingy, hesitating policy toward frontier settlers. What if all our strongholds were in peril? I held still and listened hard but could hear only the noise of the bay waters sloshing against the shingle and the drowsy note of a bird on its nest. My knees ached from the fall, and already I was sore from riding. But that did not matter.
No, I heard nothing untoward.
The air smelled sickroom-peculiar with an unpleasant mixture of smoke and filth. The stench reminded me of Father’s dislike for “bad airs” in the towns. Looking again for the gleam in the tower, I realized that what I had taken for a lamp in a window was only a low star.
This mistake frightened me, and for a moment I believed that I was not near Falmouth at all. I dropped onto my knees, and crossed my arms over my chest, doubly caging the heart that wanted to leap the bars of my ribs and bolt away. The cold points of scissors and knife pressed against me.
No, no, no, this is the place. It must be. It is. And I cannot lose Hortus in the dark.
The whole world transforms to a labyrinth after dusk, I told myself, a mad stitchery of twists and turns and no helpful thread to guide the way. And so I stood and listened to the night and then went on. All was gloom where I expected lamps and welcome, as if the order of the place had been turned back past Genesis to chaos and unmaking.
A half-burned building that I guessed to be near the juncture where Fore Street met Broad startled me. That was no more than a natural unnatural thing, for candle fires and ruins commonly mar the world. But surely, not every place would be destroyed. I wandered farther in the darkness, my hands outstretched for fear of my head striking a wall or pillar.
A breeze from the ocean tossed away the heavy odor of smoke, and I felt—not better, exactly, but more courageous. My reaching hands met an adzed log wall, not in ruins but plumb-straight and strong. Perhaps it was Goodman Seacomb’s ordinary? Was that where I was? But I saw no signboard. Once Richard Seacomb had been fined fifty shillings for selling liquor to the Indians; my brother John told me, and said it was a rogue’s trick to do so. My pulse slowed. I could have sobbed in relief to find a solid, made thing hidden in the night.
I felt my way forward to the entry and leaned against upright boards, feeling worn solidity against my hands and forehead.
But I would not knock or call or fling back the door, as I feared who might answer my greeting.
Instead, I would find the fort and take refuge. And after that, I would fetch Hortus. The captain would send soldiers to go with me and guard my passage.
The thought encouraged me. I pressed forward, passing another house and moving toward the sound of water—that would be the Casco River, washing against Broad Cove, across from Stanford’s Point and Purpoduck.
Floundering over a deep cleft in the road, I slipped to my knees, losing hold of the scissors and groping until I found them splayed on packed earth.
And there! Close by, the cairn of stones piled by men who had cleared the land. The path upward to the cannons. The law declared that a fort meant a captain, a sergeant, a gunner, and ten privates. That was the rule of such places. And the presence of soldiers promised safety.
Yet I recalled my Uncle William saying that our captain, Sylvanus Davis, often complained of a perilous shortness of men.
Lifting my hem with both hands, I darted up the slope but soon found the way too crooked to navigate quickly. Perhaps the night made it seem so. Perhaps I had not found the right marker and the main path.
The stink of the place mixed with the smell of brine from the sea. Nausea made me squat, drag up my skirts, and breathe through the cloth. But to pause might mean danger. I pushed off from the earth and stood, swaying a little. On spitting the sour taste from my mouth, I felt stronger.
Two dogs darted past me, one dragging something in its mouth and the other one growling and snatching at whatever the first bore.
“Oh,” I cried out.
Where are the lights of Fort Loyall?
In memory, pitch-dark and loneliness make up that walk. The sea rang in my ears, slamming against the stones below. Nothing for which I searched appeared, not even when I gained the very crest of the rocky bluff.
The palisade and the defensive towers were gone.
No part of the fort stood out against the stars. The refuge that we knew as Fort Loyall did not exist any longer. Emptiness yawned in its place. At once the need to find my way back to Hortus pressed on me. My breath came quick and shallow. Fumes of charcoal and something worse befouled the air. Stepping away, I stumbled over som
e scorched spars that must have been part of the stockade and landed heavily on my hip. The dropped scissors struck my knee—patting the dirt, I felt for scissors and knife and clutched them hard.
The wind changed, and an evil fetor wrapped me round. A moon-white mouser dashed at me and rubbed against my skirts. I shuddered at the ill omen: I had seen boys stone a white cat in Boston, the poor thing hissing and yowling and trying to slither away. Such creatures came as emissaries from the Evil One, or so people said. My father mocked such superstitions, but now I feared them and sprang up, not wanting one blue and one gold eye to bewitch me, as was rumored of white cats. Even with so little light, I could see that its glare flashed eye-shine into the darkness.
All I could think was to flee from that gleam; the panic made me lose my bearings and veer away wildly. A cloud slipped across the stars. Though I have never lost myself in a stone maze, I know that in a branching maze of wilderness, there can seem no exit. Race from one horror and you find out another, perhaps more fearful than the Minotaur imprisoned by Daedalus in his labyrinth.
A hill loomed above me.
Terrible vileness poured in waves from its sides. The sound of dripping came from somewhere close. By the faint light of stars, I could discern that the mound loomed wide, high, and irregular in form. I touched the surface and jerked back my hand, for its nature was fearfully perplexing to me.
I glimpsed a flash of candlelight and heard a man laugh and say in a jeering tone, “Vous avez justement ce que vous meritez.” His companion answered in a low, angry voice, but I could not catch his words for the odd accent.
So one was French. French and. . .
“Diantre,” the first man said.
I listened hard and strained to see. The spit and crackle of a bonfire, just out of sight, might mean more soldiers. I caught names. Baron de Castine. Sieur de Portneuf. Madocawando. Nothing more. Little noises, a smear of moonlight on something lifted up: it seemed that one man halted to drink from a bottle and pass it to the other.
Wabanaki? Some Indian ally of the French.
Instinctively I pressed closer to the hill.
The first appeared to be a soldier, for the light revealed a metal breastplate. As he spun around, laughing at what seemed nothing more than the joke of his own drunkenness, the lantern he carried shone directly on my hiding place. Its shaky beams illuminated the flank of the slope.
The mound that protected me was monstrous, human, with hands and profiles and hair, spines and naked buttocks and breasts. Hellish spoil, the scene showed forth faces staring in what was surely agony, some decorated with the drill-marks of musket or pistol or fouled with gouts of blood from where hatchets had crashed to the bone. Raw, bloody caps showed where their enemies had yanked hair and scalp from the skull. Some of the bodies were dressed or partially so, but many had been sacked, stripped, men and women alike, by someone who craved a soldier’s coat or a woman’s gown. From what I could guess by the quavering light of the lantern, several hundred English soldiers and settlers were the murdered earth making up that ridge of flesh. Maybe my own neighbors, the faces and voices I knew well and had hoped to see, lay stilled among the others. A white flag flapped from the crest. What mockery to plant a banner pole in the rotting clay of the murdered!
As I pulled away from the bodies, dead fingers tapped against my shoulder. A thin sluice of vomit splattered on the ground before me, my gorge rising to spew so quickly that I had no warning.
The two men abruptly ceased talking, and the French soldier, the one with the lantern, snatched it high in the air.
Trembling, I pressed close to the dead once again.
The soldier took a step forward. My heart tried to skip away as I closed my eyes and leaned against naked flesh, pretending to be a corpse, though I was one who could dread the approach of swirling and brightening light seen through her eyelids. My hands tightened on the scissors and knife.
I wanted to shriek but did not. I was being a dead girl. I could not call or move, could not break stillness. My limbs were heavy ballast, and the sea-sound of blood surged at my ears. A foul ooze moistened my back. Smatterings from tales about the outrages of the French jostled together with images of ingenious Indian torture. My breath mingled with the reek of Falmouth corpses. But something in me was wild for life, my heart beating strongly and all of me like a taut bowstring. Unable to bear sightlessness, my eyes flashed open and witnessed the Frenchman striding forward, lantern dangling from his fist. He was two rods from me, one rod, ten feet, six feet—I quivered, sweating, the desire to flee washing me with heat.
The white cat flickered by me, arrowing toward him.
“Palsanguienne!” He jerked the lantern upward, the light dazzling my eyes so that it took me instants to realize that he was staring me in the face, his mouth agape.
The mouser tangled with the man’s feet just as I jolted out of hiding with a howl that must have been composed of fear, sorrow, and rage. I hurtled at him with arms extended like a ghost from some ancient barrow of the dead, a shocking wraith who would knife him and gouge out his eyes with blades and spirit him into the wet core of that headland of flesh.
He let loose a great flaring scream and toppled over backward. The wick of his candle was at once extinguished. While he flailed about and cursed, I thrust off, springing at the dark in the direction of the path. The lantern clattered as if kicked, and two sets of footsteps thudded behind me, perhaps following, perhaps pounding another way, the fright sending Mercury-wings to their heels. Who knows? Too panicked to be able to make a proper judgment, I only fled the faster when a pistol fired.
At the risk of tumbling from the bluff into the waves or braining myself on the bole of a tree, I flung myself into the nothingness of night. All my fears of foe-men and dark and the sneaking witch-ways of white mousers—but she had saved me!—bundled together and shoved me forward. Rocks and uneven ground slapped at the soles of my feet. The moldered, vile-tasting air sawed in and out of my mouth.
A stitch in my side stalled my feet before I could do myself any great harm. I leaned over, panting, sobbing and gasping, the spittle drooling from my lips. Slowly I grew calmer and knelt on the ground, letting go of the knife and scissors. My fingers dug into the earth and eventually relaxed when I heard no further noise of men. Behind me, a pillar of fire surged up, and I knew that soon nothing would remain of the place called Casco or Falmouth.
Gunpowder and whiskey tossed on the bonfire, surely. . .
I rested in a blank state, emptied of fright and the will to stir, my gaze resting on the blaze that mounted, taking arms against the sky, as calmly as if I watched hearth-fire flare and snap. My thoughts drifted to the days that had sunk into the abyss of the unreachable past, when I lived in my father and mother’s house with Mary and our young men, and with all my kin close by. The women might be gathered to sew by the fire in the evening—my mother, Aunt Rebecca, Aunt Mercy, Aunt Sarah, and Aunt Hannah, who looked like a child, her nose dusted with cinnamon freckles, though she was big with child herself. But by this hour, I would have been asleep in the trundle with Mary, the breathing of my family all around, the whole fortress of a house alive with breath of aunts and uncles and children. We slept well after our labors; we would have worked all day and been glad to laugh at one another in the silly moments that would never come again, and to listen to my father read from Scripture or pray aloud, his voice rising and falling, as regular as the waves of a peaceful sea.
Thy hand strews blessings. Thy power turns aside evil.
I could almost hear the words.
But not quite.
The very atoms of me wanted to spring apart over the Atlantic, there to slip as dew into some phosphorescent patch of ocean and be lost. How tired I was! My sore legs and back made me long to stop. Just to stop. I could have curled there in the damp May grasses and slept, breathing in the scent of smoke. But the rising flick, flick, flick of fear is a goad, and so instead I walked, counting my footsteps once more, moving stead
ily down the rutted path. Once I spun around in a frenzy, fearing that I could not find the broken tree, but the moon glided out from behind a cloud, and by that illumination and by starlight I went forward, away from fire and the villainous works of men, and at last put my arms around the strong, towered neck of Hortus, wept, and then left that place forever.
2
Wilderings
Late May 1690, Massachusetts Bay Colony
Because of Indian attack or ill judgment in the original siting, a house is occasionally dismantled and much of it taken away in fragments. First, the crown glass, fragile quarrels, or sheet glass panes are carefully removed and taken up and packed in sawdust or rags, and next the shutters and doors carried away, and any clapped-on boards pried up and the squared nails removed to use again. For many hours, the sense of a place for the life of family lingers, but bit by bit the house loses all sense and meaning until it is only a bedlam collection of unwanted or too-heavy remains, and perhaps only a tumble of logs or a massive central chimbley or a stepping stone before the absent door.
So it seemed with me when I flew from Falmouth. I was dismantled. I was a house without walls where the mad winds play.
What was left to me but the three-personed God and Hortus? Faith that the divine was always near comforted me; and yet, the fresh thought that God did not order and arrange every detail of our lives was both solace and terror. I had stepped outside the pale of my childhood’s teachings into a world that was a fallen realm, invaded by evil. Any unexpected event could happen without notice, without time to call for mercy. I pondered the thief on the cross, so brazen and yet innocent in his request, and how Christ promised him the outrageous boon of paradise. And were not all my family more deserving of such a reward than a thief? I prayed for them. I prayed for myself. I prayed for any captives who were stumbling through the wilderness, feeding themselves on roots and hogweed and rotten acorns, lashed on by those who did not love them.
Charis in the World of Wonders Page 6
