Charis in the World of Wonders

by Marly Youmans

  Weeks later, poring over a map, I found that we must have slipped downward between the settlement at Salmon Falls and Portsmouth in the hunt for fresh water. And perhaps we forded the Piscataqua far inland, a hard-enough labor even at slack tide, before passing west of what they call the Great Bay in a land of many streams and smaller rivers. So Hortus and I wandered southward, wading the spring growth and the waters, until we came to the Merrimack and a road over wet ground built of logs, adzed flat and held secure by wedges, leading into a hard-packed cart path that wound on through wilderness.

  3

  Haven

  June 1690, Haverhill

  I dare say that my wayward peregrinations could have gone on for more days, but when I came upon a rough-ribbed road at dawn, and met laborers uprooting stumps and preparing new ground for planting, my journey found its end. The youngest of them led Hortus by the bridle—after a few balky moments when my horse laid back his ears and showed the whites of his eyes—to a fine dwelling-house nearby, stealing looks at me with some wonderment. I was quite the wild-woman spectacle with my filthy and torn garments, Indian-style seat, and scratched and mosquito-bitten arms, and neither bonnet or hat but only a wreck of braid tumbled from the coif that dangled down my back. He seemed no more than fifteen, boasting a mighty thatch of straw-colored hair, a great flaming push on his neck, and such a look of innocence about the eyes that I suspected he might be daft.

  People at the house were not slow to come and greet me, being as curious as the boy who showed the way. He bowed to them, mumbling, “Your Honors,” at the ground in a bashful manner when one of them spoke. A fine-looking couple of middling age were trailed by a young woman bearing a child around a year old or thereabouts in her arms and an older woman dressed in an undyed linen gown and neck kerchief, who I took to be a servant.

  The master, geared for labor in leather breeches and Kendal green waistcoat (Major Saltonstall, as I soon learned he was called), strode forward and lifted me from Hortus, calling out, “Lud, see to the horse.” He carried me into a parlor and set me down in front of a big central chimbley, where there was a pleasant summer fire burning. The walls were white with clam-shell lime, and the bare floors had been scoured and sprinkled with fine sand. And that short passage was a fine thing, as it seemed I was a babe in arms again and had forgotten how to walk, now that I no longer needed to rely on my feet. They quivered like the legs of Hortus after he swam the Piscataqua.

  “How now, what has happened to you—what is your name, child, and where have you come from?”

  My eyes glazed over with tears as I named my father and mother and told him how I had come on Hortus from near to Falmouth.

  “I once met your father—a staunch friend, I believe, of Mr. Samuel Sewall.”

  Mistress Saltonstall brought me a glass of hippocras as a restorative, and when she saw that my hands shook, she knelt beside the settle and helped me, tipping the glass.

  “Better,” she said, and pressed her hand to my cheek.

  The color and flavor of wine, the taste of ginger and nutmeg and clove, the shine of glass: they touched me, made me want to weep for the beauty of made, human things. I heard the speech around me like the echoing ring of struck crystal, the questions humming on the air. To my ears, my own voice seemed equally chiming and otherworldly.

  It sounded high, a little cracked in tone, the voice of someone who had gone beside me and knew my losses and trials but who was not quite me.

  “Sir, the Indians raided us in the morning. My mother bade me climb down the tree at the rear of the house with my sister Mary and go to our meeting place and bide until—but they never came to get us, and when I went back—”

  “And now perhaps you fear being the mistress of your family, all that is left. Do not trouble yourself with overmuch of talk,” Major Saltonstall said. “You will have to tell us everything that you remember, later, so that I can write Governor Bradstreet and some others, to inform them of your story and to see what can be done.”

  My fingers trembled, and I pressed my hands together on my breast.

  “At Falmouth,” I began, guessing that I should tell the worst.

  “Casco Bay,” the major said. “I was there once with sixty soldiers. A most precarious settlement.”

  Mistress Saltonstall held the glass for me again. I rested my hand on hers as I drank, my head tilted up so that the tears wet my temples and wandered back into my knotted hair.

  I shut my eyes, remembering the lantern swinging in the Falmouth dark.

  “Children and women and men. Butchered,” I said. “Hundreds of them, a midden of flesh, a mountain. The fort destroyed.”

  In the silence that followed, the others stared at me.

  “Oh,” the young woman cried out suddenly, “monstrous!”

  “Murderous acts fomented by New France,” Major Saltonstall said, resting a hand on her arm. “The French are so small in number compared to our people that they incite the tribes to devilish crimes against us.”

  “God, have mercy! So dreadful,” she said.

  “Indeed, I wondered,” Major Saltonstall said, “to see that Major Church was returned with his troops to Boston from Falmouth after the struggle with the French and Indians last year. It seemed meet and right to me that he stay to protect the English awhile longer. And this the event sadly proves.”

  “Nabby,” Mistress Saltonstall said to the woman in the doorway, not taking her eyes from mine, “make haste and bring me a bowl of bread and milk. And what of your sister,” she added, though it did not sound like a question.

  “I left her in the forest. In our hiding place. She fell from my back and struck her head when we were fleeing. And later died in the night.” I recalled the glaze that soaked her hair, and the inexplicable bruising behind her ear and on her throat.

  “So I am at fault, I fear.”

  “You endured the perils of flight, and that is often when mischance occurs. Though our every act matters, we cannot foretell what comes to us,” Major Saltonstall said.

  “I should have cared for her better,” I said softly.

  “Do not reproach yourself,” he said. “It is a hard thing for any of us to navigate a wilderness without paths. Many have come to grief there.”

  “Be of good comfort and know that you are safe now,” Mistress Saltonstall added.

  She had lifted my right hand, inspecting the weals left by insects, lashes from twigs, and black crescent moons under my jagged fingernails. Now she turned to regard her husband. “The poor young woman is weary and should sleep soon, though I would like to have the grime of the journey scrubbed away,” she said, “and we must take good care that she be not chilled. She must be kept warm.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Such labors I leave to you, madam; I shall write letters to the governor and General Court. Though I do not find it much avail if soldiers visit once mischief is done to us. Still, so many burials demand our attention.”

  One of the men from the fields appeared with my few chattels in his arms and said that my horse had been watered and was being rubbed down. After bidding him to lay the bundle on the floor, Major Saltonstall excused himself, and the two left the parlor. I must have been worried about my goods because I felt glad to see that they had not been cast aside, filthy from travel as they were. Nabby came in with a bowl of milk and bread sweetened with dried blueberries, which I ate with as much pleasure and thanksgiving as if it had been marchpane and a rich bride cake stuffed with almonds and citron and currants, Mistress Saltonstall feeding me with a spoon as if I were a baby.

  “Eliza, will you ask Nabby to bring the kettle of water on the kitchen fire to the westerly bedchamber, with a piece of lye soap for the young mistress’ hair? Have her put more on to heat. And could you bring a shift from my chest, with some of the linen scrubbing strips as well? I do not see how we can avoid the hazard of bathing.”

  The young woman, who I suspected must be her daughter, nodded and disappeared from the chamber, taking th
e sleeping child with her.

  Though I felt stronger, they still treated me as if I were as helpless as the babe in arms. Upstairs, the mother and daughter washed the sand and soil from my hair with their own hands and brought me water scented with mint for soaking the rest of me, Nabby fetching a little more warm water before the whole process was ended, for despite my dunkings in streams, I was powerfully dirty and stank of horse and fish.

  Dressed in clean linen and tucked into the bed with covers to my chin, women’s voices murmuring around me as they wiped the floor near the washing bowl, I felt wholly warm and safe, drifting with the tide of sleep. And for weariness, I slept all that day and the ensuing night and only woke to the smell of wood smoke and the sound of voices when the sun searched me out the following morning.

  The Saltonstalls were there, peeping in at the door when I opened my eyes. I looked around at the white walls and the sun flooding in.

  “Is this Haverhill?”

  Mistress Saltonstall laughed in surprise and came forward.

  “Yes, the very same,” the major said from the doorway, “bought almost a half-century ago from Passaconnaway, Chief of the Pennacooks and great sachem of all the Merrimack Valley tribes. We are a little ways east of the village.”

  “Good,” I said. “I am glad and grateful to be here.”

  “And we to have you here,” Mistress Saltonstall said, smiling down at me.

  Perhaps it is strange that I slept so well that night, for certainly I had somehow lost my ability to sleep soundly and be renewed on the day that my family was torn from me. In later nights, I was so troubled with evening dreams that Mistress Saltonstall took to bidding me to go to bed early. It seems she would sit up in my bedchamber, and often held my hand if I wept in my sleep, or else stroked my forehead until I wandered past nightmares and into an easy slumber. She had me placed alone in case of some contagion, but I was not ill, despite my days and nights exposed to the wilderness and dark. At least, I was not unwell in any common sense of that word. It was strange to have no bed-mates. Even once I proved healthy, I still lay alone in my bed, for I proved no quiet slumberer. In the early morning, while still dark, Elizabeth Saltonstall or sometimes the husband and wife together would come to my bedchamber again and sit vigil, for in those hours I was restless and disturbed in my sleep.

  Certain images came back to me, and others cropped up fresh, as if I had some secret window for news into past events. And while many of the godly have put great credit in dreams as telling us something we did not know, and which might be whispered to us through word or image in the night, Major Saltonstall advised me that a mind roiled by the sights of such a massacre and wild adventure was a mind untethered, and that I should pay no heed to my dreaming hours once awake, with the vision dissolved into motes. Looking back, I think this assurance a proof of considerable wisdom in him, though it went against what I had often been told about the matter of dreams.

  Many times I awoke with a terrible cry trembling in my throat, only to find the pair of them seated with a candle burning in between. Startled from their own low conversation, the couple sometimes looked as affrighted as if a bold, murderous fiend had just appeared at the door. Mistress Saltonstall would rise and wipe my forehead with a damp cloth, soothing me the way a mother soothes a little child with words that flowed over me like water. What kindness it was in her to see me first through the evening’s rough shoals until I sank deeper and could sleep without disturbance, and later to come to my bedchamber in the early morning dark and see me safely to the shores of wakefulness.

  Since Eliza had a child to tend, she was often up in the night. The black ribbons on her arm told me why Eliza Dennison was home again, a mother returned to be a daughter, with her own griefs to master. Though only now and again at the house, Nabby was afraid of my outcries, which she described in comical fashion as “a whoop in her stroop.” While Mistress Saltonstall did sometimes wish to hire other women servants to assist in the kitchen in times of need, little help was available in such a raw frontier town.

  Most often I dreamed of Mary. Sometimes it was only a voice. “Charis, Charis—”

  The name murmured in the dark of sleep would start me from the depths and set me to dreaming.

  Sometimes I was back in our room of leaves with Mary leaning toward me with her hand outstretched. I felt an intense horror that she would touch me. Because she was neither living nor dead but in some tomland in between, I could not bear to look at her and yet could not swerve away, as is sometimes the manner in a dream. Her flesh was changed to be like death, but spirit still animated her limbs and face. When her hand brushed against my shoulder, I would cry out to be saved, and someone always came. I shall never forget that mercy.

  Whenever I woke, it seemed as if the elements around me changed and my body plunged abruptly into cold, so that I shivered under the bed-coverings. I do not know; perhaps it was from seeing such strange images. Perhaps it was simply that I often floated close to the door of death in sleep and found it hard to return to the regions of the living.

  Once I dreamed of my brother Joseph, bending to half-hide the red thread on the forest floor. I was so glad to see his face, the blue, blue eyes under the thicket of hair, the straight nose, and the little scar shaped like a sickle on his cheekbone.

  “How do you fare, sister? Come on,” he said to me. “You’re late—everyone else has gone home.”

  He moved so quickly through the trees that I could not keep up, though I cried out to him. “Joseph, Joseph, wait for me! I don’t know the way.”

  I could hear him laughing and calling to me, but he would not bide. I followed the red thread deeper into the woods, and at last saw that it was no longer yarn but a free-flowing vein of blood, winding around the leaves and bubbling into the distance.

  “Brother! Joseph!” I listened but there was nothing, and I woke to see Elizabeth Saltonstall’s face, bending over mine.

  “Charis,” she said, “Charis,” calling me by my first name in a high, sweet tone.

  “I can be more,” I whispered, “be stronger.”

  “What do you mean? What are you saying?”

  “I do not know,” I said, and fell asleep again. And if she had not told me of our words later, I would never have known them.

  At times I dreamed of the Mi’kmaq, and in those dreams he stirred and raised himself and was turning toward me. Fright flashed along my spine; I opened my mouth to shriek. But I never saw his face, always waking before I could glimpse his expression—strange that I felt so curious to know how he would look on me, whether with anger or sorrow or scorn.

  Other times I roved through our house near Falmouth, everything tidy and a fire burning on the hearth. My voice echoed like the sound of a clapper striking bell-metal.

  “Mother, Father—Isaac, John, Joseph! Onesimus! Blue Jonas!” I called for Mary and her playmate, cousin Tom. I reeled off the names of aunts and uncles and cousins, the long list of those who had sheltered in the house on that last day, but no one answered. Once I heard the sharp noise of boot heels on steps, but no one was there when I ran to the stairs. I hurried from hall to parlor to bedchambers, calling, and when I woke mumbling their names, I found that tears had drenched my face and pillow.

  Mistress Saltonstall showed compassion to me, more than my wayward sleep behavior deserved, I fear. On my third morning in the place, I slept late after restless dreams and rose to find my mother’s blanket stretched out and drying in the sunshine. She spent a deal of time mending the snags in the cloth with her own hands, and I can still picture her with the indigo blue draped over her lap, working with a little hook to even out the surface until it was restored to much of its former appearance. Likewise, she caused my sampler to be cleaned and set across a paneled chest that stood at the foot of the bed. Mary’s unfinished doll and the scissors and knife were placed close beside, so that I could always see a few remains of the past.

  In the day, life became practical, and I could laugh with t
he women as we sewed or took turnabout to dandle and play with Eliza’s boy, fourteen months old and merry and in the thick of whatever went on around him. Eliza. She was friendly to me, as I could expect from meeting such kindness in her mother. Eliza was my elder and by rights should have been Mistress Dennison to me, but she bade me treat her as a sister. I liked best that she told me stories about Governor Dudley’s family and Mistress Anne Dudley Bradstreet, the poet, for her late husband’s grandmother was Mistress Bradstreet’s sister. We women often sat together, sewing companionably. Mistress Saltonstall was determined that I should have garments suited to my station in life, though I had been cast out of my place and felt uncertain where and what it should be, now that my father and mother and all the signs of worldly rank were lost.

  My green gown was nearly past mending, but Nabby repaired it as best she could, cutting away the tattered, stained hem and adding a brick-red band around the foot of the skirt and a matching band that covered a rip in the bodice. Until then, I wore my violet gown and the coif with white leaves, for I had nothing else.

  Mistress Saltonstall set us to work cutting down gowns, shifts, and petticoats that had belonged to a young woman who had no longer any use for them, having been felled by typhus some years before while on a journey westward. Evidently she possessed letters of safe conduct signed by the governor and a magistrate but little more in the way of an introduction—she must have been a bold, enterprising person to set off journeying with strangers. No one lives lone among the godly, so she would have been placed with a family. But she never reached her far destination of Westfield. Having no known will and no living relations in the New World, she left no worldly goods to anyone, and the clothes remained in the place where the unfortunate traveler had died.

  “You could see that she was a lively sort of young woman, even as she fell into sickness,” Mistress Saltonstall told me. “She came to us by accident, out of need, when I was still a young woman. The constable brought her to our doorstep because she had newly arrived and had yet to notify and be confirmed by the courts. She did not mean to stay long. But she was unwell and never left, poor thing. I can still see her flushed face as she rattled off the oath of fidelity. My husband paid a bond to admit her to the town, for it was evident she could not yet go on to Westfield.”