“Water, yes, water, water,” Phoebe Wardwell cried, clutching at my arm with both hands.
Bel went out and came back with a cup of honey-water, which she held to Phoebe’s lips. The sick woman drank a little, but tears filled her eyes and she lay back, exhausted, and would take no food, whispering that she must mortify the flesh, for it was evil, evil.
When she slept, we left her to the ministrations of Goody Ann Poor and several more people from town who had come to see how the young mother fared and provide whatever consolation they might.
“People will say the wrong words, I am afraid.” Wrapping the blanket over my cloak, I stepped out the door. “And she will be afflicted more, when what she needs is good news of mercy and love. And perhaps something delicate—a gilded bird of Barbary sugar, holding a rock-candy violet. Some pretty sweet nothing that says we remember and care about her. For things also speak.”
“Indeed, I hope people will not say wrongly,” Bel Dane said, following after me. “In truth, I do not know whether to abide more with Mr. Dane and comfort or with Mr. Barnard and the threats of the invisible world, with its contest between angels and devils. Does it seem like a choice between a more kindly England and a severe Massachusetts to you?”
“Perhaps. You are, I think, the most cheerful woman in Andover.” I paused, thinking of one or two moments that had given me an uncertainty on this matter, but went on. “And that is part of why I like you. Surely you will be on the side of charity. And I, I have been through enough unpleasantness to see that God does not dabble with our lives but suffers and joys with us. It is human beings who are fallen and cause most of the woeful trials in the world, whether they be Wabanaki or Norfolk men, Mather-trained Boston divines who rant overmuch of devils and unwholesome abasement or else Jesuits from France who entice the tribes to murder us in our beds.” There I stopped, having said more of a speech than I meant to say.
“I doubt that is entirely approved sentiment, and so I am glad Mr. Barnard did not hear you,” Bel Dane said. “Or we would have a hard scolding about being insensible to the warfare of the invisible world and the machinations of Satan. Which perhaps I am,” she said. “Perhaps I am too buoyant in spirits, and Phoebe Wardwell knows more than either of us.”
“Her unrest speaks the brute pain of her lying-in and, I expect, the melancholy that has afflicted her since.”
“It may be,” my friend said, with less of lightness than I had seen in her before.
The next morning, after I spent a pleasant hour reading a treatise on gilding and tapping Mr. Herrick’s marks into silver, we set off once more. I carried a bottle of cordial, and Goody Bel Dane had a sack of small honey cakes. The cold was even more bitter than the day before, and the air blustery.
When we were more than halfway there, we met an old man racing at a gallop toward town. Primus, the African slave of Mr. Stevens, stayed for us only long enough to report that he was to fetch the magistrate and men to search the woods near the Wardwell fields, for when Thomas Wardwell had wakened at dawn, he had seen no sign of his wife and child. Already a few inquiries had been made in town, to no avail.
“Surely you should not rush so speedily,” I said, thinking of the respect due his age, but he flew away from us as if borne by inconstant winds, alternately trotting and hobbling toward the village.
Bel Dane stood stock still, a dusting of snow on her shoulders, watching as he darted onward. “How can that be?” She frowned at the gusts that dashed up crystals and twisted skeins of flakes into snow-devils.
“What about the secret tunnel? Perhaps Thomas Wardwell has not thought of it—no one knows, do they? Except he and his wife and us. Might she have gone there in distress to consider death and the grave? And taken the babe with her? Or perhaps ventured there to feel that she was reborn, moving from dark to the light at dawn?”
“Yes,” Bel said, and took off, running awkwardly in pattens, arms flailing for balance.
Forgetting the babe in my womb, I panted just behind her until we saw the house, its drab box set against the whiteness. At last we slowed, gasping but not stopping because of the fierce breeze that slapped particles of ice against our faces.
Before reaching the door, we glimpsed several distant figures struggling across the landscape.
“Searchers,” I said. “Sad little babe in this cold. Poor Phoebe Wardwell.”
Inside, no one answered our call. We hurried to the fire and rubbed our hands until we were half-warmed, for we would be of no use frozen. I leaned over, my belly cramping. Bel Dane hunted up a tallow candle and lit it with a burning straw.
“What will we do if we find her?”
“Save them,” I said. “What else could it be?”
We stared, each at the other: her eyes reflected the flickering movements of the candle’s flame.
Without Phoebe Wardwell, we had a little trouble finding the fingerhold but at last managed to discover the slot and heave the trapdoor into the air. Bel climbed down first as I held the light. She took the candlestick from me and waited as I stepped downward—pausing once to reach up and slide the square back into place, for we had no wish to harm someone hurrying down the hall, all unknowing.
Our luminous opening was gone, and we were truly in cave-like dark. The candle flame wavered, as if we had put some of our own uncertainty into its wick. But we turned and crept down the tunnel.
“Stop!” I fumbled at something on the ground while Bel Dane held up the candlestick. “A ribbon.” I held it up to the flame.
“Red.”
“A sleeve ribbon, maybe?”
“It looks quite clean and fresh.”
“Someone must have tied it on her, surely, for a bit of cheer,” I said. “She is in no condition for ribbons.”
Afraid of tripping over the mother and child, we progressed slowly, little step by little step, moving toward the outer door. The distance was not so far but seemed like an ill dream in which one strives but progresses nowhere and is still trapped. The smell of the tunnel was a mix of earth and mold and also lavender, which made us again think that Phoebe Wardwell had passed this way.
“Nothing,” Bel said, holding up the candlestick.
“Just this,” I said, retrieving a crude broom.
The rise toward the outer door lay before us, and the flame cast enough light that we could see that the remainder of the tunnel was empty. Creeping forward, we reached for the wooden boards overhead and began to push. I prodded the wood with the broom handle, but yielded it to Bel Dane, who hammered roughly at an edge. The burden of snow made heavy work, and a fresh seal of ice on tough winter stems latched the door to earth. It took us several tries before the door lifted an inch and we could see a stripe of daylight.
“How did she manage?” Bel Dane’s voice was muffled.
“Maybe she came early, when there was less snow. Or she found strength in her feelings, whatever they were. Or else she did not come this way.”
Thrusting mightily, we flung back the door and threw ourselves onto the snowy ground. This time we did not rest in the snow, as we had once before, but sprang to our feet. Bel Dane tossed the broom back inside.
“I was so sure,” she said.
“Yes, somehow I thought she would be there, kneeling in the dark with Josiah in her arms. But perhaps she would have been too weak to raise the trapdoor. And it would be hard to carry him safely down the ladder.”
“But sometimes people surprise us with what they can do.”
“Yes,” I said.
Hands on hips, we surveyed the Wardwell domain. Now the figures we had seen before were invisible, their dun-colored clothing lost in trees.
“Too much new snow,” I said.
“I see not one blessed thing that would help,” Bel Dane said. “I will go check the hillock, though probably no good will come of it.”
“A fine thought,” I said, though I did not expect anything either. “And mayhap we shall eventually learn that she had the notion of visiting some c
ousin or former neighbor.”
Bel was not listening. “Surely if anyone can find her, it will be me,” she said.
My friend walked away from me, leaving a trail of prints on fresh snow. If Phoebe Wardwell had wandered here, we might find more, though new snow made that hope unlikely. The area around the house had had too many searchers already, and the snow was confused with footprints. The trees, the fields with stumps rotting in place, the occasional shrub: the site was not much to look on. But I walked aimlessly over the ground, scanning the horizon, until I came to the bucket of ice and snow near the roofed well. And there it came to me that I should just look. I clambered on the slippery rocks and knelt at the curb’s edge, leaning forward until I could see—
A face, uptilted and gleaming palely under a pane of ice.
A hand and an arm, almost to the elbow, reached through that frozen window, the slender fingers outstretched.
What might be an infant’s face, lower than the first, shone dimly through a surface that was clouded by a few skeins of snow stars.
Whether fit for the moment or not, words coursed through my head: For now we see through a glass darkly: but then shall we see face-to-face. Now I know in part: but then shall I know even as I am known. And now abideth faith, hope and love, even these three: but the chiefest of these is love.
The chiefest of these is love.
I crouched on the stones with pain burning cold at my knees, and I put my hand into the shadows of the well, as though Phoebe could still grasp a warm and living hand and be hauled to safety, as though I could still rescue Josiah and rock him to sleep in the chimbley corner.
And I prayed to Christ who sits on the mercy seat as I had never prayed before, that he would take her outstretched hand and comfort the woman and forgive her for all her wild, disordered thoughts, her deepest despairs, and her mad rush over snow and rocks and into air and ice and water, and that he would welcome her and the babe into heaven. The tears flooded to my eyes and seemed to hold there, stiff and cold, until melting onto my cheeks like a second skin. My salt tears began to freeze, sealing sorrow against my face.
“The chiefest of these is love,” I whispered, my hand still reaching toward the lifted hand. “The chiefest of these. Is love. Love. The chiefest of these.”
Then I keened to the field of stumps and the shrubs and the forest where the devils and wild men dance and where the godly fear to go (though I have gone there, yes, and lived), to the distant figures of the searchers and Bel Dane, to the low clouds gravid with snow, to the frozen, rutted fields and the ice that shut and the liquid that cauled the bodies under the hard glaze that separated water and air. And I keened to God and to the Spirit and to Christ on the mercy seat, and my voice went out of me like a bird, as swift and strong as a peregrine, and for all I know, ringed the round world and falcon-flew to touch the highest heaven.
8
The Groaning-Time
Andover and Haverhill, 1691
For long afterward, it seemed that nothing more would happen, and that everything that could go amiss was over and done, though Jotham Herrick and I knew from our own histories that the world rolls on from bad to good and from good to bad like a cartwheel that is smooth on even ground but inevitably meets stones and pits and stumps on its way. The sorrow at the well colored my days. Yet I had learned at Falmouth how we keep on despite calamity, no matter how dire and harrowing, no matter how many dead visit us in dreams at night.
Goody Holt and Lizzie still avoided me, but others were friendly in the shops or at the meetinghouse. Perhaps Goody Holt had discovered a cache of sympathy and kindness—or perhaps being at peace with such a mother meant being less concerned with Charis Herrick.
And there was the matter of the well.
“Why were you the one to find her?” One Sabbath, Mehitabel Dane seized me by the wrist and spoke to me angrily. “How did you know?”
I stared in wonderment. “I did not know. How could I?”
Her grip loosened and then tightened once more, and she let go roughly, flinging my arm away.
“What has happened—” But before I could protest that she was parting ways with friendship, she turned away to greet Mr. Barnard.
Because the ground was frozen, Phoebe Wardwell’s body and the babe fastened to her by ice went into a cold barn like a length of boards and waited there for spring, and Thomas Wardwell returned to his father and mother and left the house empty. Once the place was used to shelter a traveling family for a week, and another time a constable and a Quaker headed for trial slept there, but mostly it was bare and dark, and after a short time, people tended to forget the place existed, so lonely beyond the last cluster of houses and the hay-crammed tannery, still waiting for Goody Holt’s John to finish his indenture and make a stench, so that the townspeople could complain and yet be glad of his work.
And only when the earth thawed did we have a funeral, though it was sad enough with the grave dug outside the low stone wall of the burying ground. Much commotion and argument rose up between the ministers as to whether Phoebe Wardwell had been tempted by devilish thoughts and so did away with herself and murdered her little babe, or whether she had been ill and out of her right wits and thus had tumbled into the well unawares, or whether, indeed, it was possible for a mortal to know the answer.
This controversy made a tempest for a week and died away. Only too soon Phoebe Wardwell was forgotten again.
Mehitabel Dane and I mourned her longer than almost anyone, I fear. Thomas Wardwell had set his face away from his old life. Goodman Richard Dane said to us that Goodman Wardwell would never again live in the house and meant to sell it, though as yet no one wished to buy. It was marred and but half a house, and it seemed ill-storied and luckless to our townspeople. I doubt, though, that Thomas Wardwell forgot Phoebe his wife and little Josiah. I knew what it was like to want to forget—even to long to forget the sweetness that had gone before in order to forget what came at the close. But I also knew that such wiping-away was not possible. Eventually sorrow ceases to be the first thing that recurs to mind when we wake in the morning, but I believe that no day passes without some memorial to ruin. For at least one instant in the day, we are confronted with a hard, intractable stone set up in memory. Or so it is for me, and I believe for Jotham Herrick, whose parents and two sisters had died in Boston twelve years back, swept away by the smallpox in the space of days.
“The end of Phoebe Wardwell’s life was not all of her life,” Jotham Herrick said to me, and I found the thought comforting, for had she not been known as a tender daughter and wife before the sickness and despair came over her? I honored her memory, and the rest I left to God.
About that time, Deliverance Dane told me that Goody Holt and Lizzie had been making unkind hints about me to the elder minister—something to do with Phoebe Wardwell’s death. Mr. Dane had spoken firmly to them in denial and cautioned them to avoid gossip. It wrapped me in a dark mist; it bothered me, but as nothing came of the complaint, and Mr. Dane spoke of their claims as nonsense, I soon forgot, though the memory came back to me later on.
The spring was not all about the funeral and endings. The first flowers broke out, the ground feverishly greened, the birds knitted their songs into the leaves again, and the geese tarried with us on their way to far nesting grounds. But we did not let them all go past us to the Wabanaki and the French. Many stopped with us, whether brought down in flight or killed while settling on the Merrimack to the north or floating on the Great Pond. They made fine spring feasts, having fattened on sunny grasses far to the south.
Who knew where? Mr. Dane claimed that they flew to the hot continent below, where the Spanish had conquered ancient castles made of gold that glimmered in the jungles and on cliffs, and where particolored beasts and birds as fabulous as gryphons and dragons roamed the wilderness or glided in and out a luxuriant canopy of leaves.
I found these tales easy to credit, for had I not seen strange things in the wilderness, or even quite close
to Andover? In May, Jotham Herrick and I built a rock weir in a stream and harvested fish and picked the coiled fern fronds nearby. I had learned such springtime gleanings from my time near Falmouth. One morning we stumbled on several women and a few children gathering greens near our fishing grounds—the boys and girls dressed in deerskin, with a hanging cloth at the hips and leg wraps and mantle against the chilly air, and the women with a tied-together skirt, mantle, and necklaces made of copper and beads. But all our startlement and theirs was nothing next to our realization that an immense creature had appeared between the trees and was picking his way toward us. The Wampa-noag (for so I supposed them, remembering other encounters) spoke in their own language and swiftly gathered up their packets of fish wrapped in leaves and backed away into the woods until all sight of them was lost.
“What is it?” My hand groped for and found Jotham’s. I could hardly look away from the comical, monstrous spectacle.
Jotham Herrick, too, stared in wonder at this conundrum of the forest. “An elk, maybe?” He lowered his voice as if afraid it might hear.
What a lovely, liquid morning it was, with the birds, those pipers of embroidered spring songs, alive in the trees—the stream singing its own rushing and curling song, the weir murmuring, and the early morning dawn still dyed pink here and there between branches! The sweet odors of earth and flowers rose from the damp ground as if breathed out, into the world. And in the midst of it all, this big-bellied vastness on spindle legs. The nose looked soft and drooping, and altogether the beast appeared as a riotous, confused thing.
He lowered his head, crowned with new nubs of antlers, and began to lip at the foliage under the trees. His breath ruttled as he blew outward and sent the plants to trembling.
“We should retreat,” Jotham Herrick said. “Look how the Indians melted into the trees when he appeared. They know better than we how to behave in this case.”
“Jotham,” I whispered. And I remembered the great sea-beast Leviathan, whose sneezings send forth light, whose strength is “as the nether millstone.”
Charis in the World of Wonders Page 23
