Charis in the World of Wonders

by Marly Youmans

  I knew better than to send my husband out to be accused of night-walking when many hours and perhaps days of labor lay ahead, and in truth I was glad to be with him, for when the midwife knocked, out of the chamber he would go! We sat up in bed with his arms around me, and I dozed in between the pains, still far apart.

  At dawn, Jotham Herrick sent a neighbor boy with word to the midwife, but she was attending the birth of a double-bent child in a Farrington house somewhere between the digging called Claypit and Woodchuck Hill. She would not be able to leave, at least not yet, and maybe not at all. But some of the Dane women arrived shortly—Goodwife Deliverance Dane, who was married to Goodman Nathaniel Dane, and whom I knew well by this time, and two of the minister’s daughters, the well-married Mistress Abigail Faulkner with her own young daughters, Abby and Francis, and Widow Johnson with her daughter Betty. Goody Carrier came last; I had not known she was Mr. Francis Dane’s niece. Some of the others in the family were at the Farrington house.

  All but the two younger girls had seen many births and promised that they would not need the ministrations of a midwife. Why, Goody Deliverance Dane had attended so many births, she was as adept as one! And if they did need more help, they would send for the midwife again and make her come.

  Elizabeth Johnson said a prayer, and although I do not remember all, some of the words lingered with me: We acknowledge that for our transgression and sin inherited from our great-grandmother Eve, women are afflicted with mortal pains. And so we pray for our sister, Mistress Charis Herrick, and also for Goody Farrington, that the Farrington child may be turned in the womb and the mother and babe after trial find their rest, whether on earth or heaven.. . .

  The thought came to me that when Elizabeth Dane was a young woman, she had been accused of undue familiarity with Goodman Johnson, the man she later married. Were not a woman’s transgressions remembered forever in this life? It was easy to tumble and fall. People often called her only Johnson’s wife. She lost clear claim to the title of Goodwife and her rightful place in the world, all for the sake of love and pleasure. And so it was with Eve, lingering by the tree with the serpent, listening to his sibilant promises. We women were forced to remember our great-grandmother still.

  Abigail Dane had done much better, marrying the son of Mr. Edmund Faulkner, who with Mr. Woodbridge had negotiated for the town land, and who had settled most of his estate on his eldest son, as nobles did in England. And yet they were sisters still, and who knows what fate would come to each? Mr. Francis Faulkner was now an invalid, and his wife in charge of their estate, an unexpected situation that disturbed many in Andover who thought it wrong for a woman to play the part of a man. The paths to and through marriage were a strange labyrinth.

  Despite the month, the night was cool, and a fire had been laid and the windows shuttered tight; I began to perspire, which everyone agreed would be helpful. Goodwife Dane took charge, as the one who had seen the most in the way of childbirth. She had brought with her a pot of butter and some silk for tying the cord, as well as cloth.

  “All will be well,” she said, and the others looked at her as if she had made a prophecy, and there was a hush. Mistress Faulkner clapped her hands to break the silence and sent Abby to fetch me a cup of beer.

  We may close the door against men in such times, and it is as well to close the door on groans and shrieks in memory as well, but I will admit that it was a hard day of work, with much loud prayer and exclamation from all attending and a goodly store of beer and cold meat and cakes consumed by the others, though I could eat nothing. What I find most surprising about either attending or suffering through childbirth is how when women are walking along the edge of the Jordan, holding hands within sight of the mower, Death, with his cloak and sickle, they can yet laugh, pray, tell stories, and encourage one another. A painful sweetness is compacted in those hours.

  The fingers may loosen and be impossible to hold, the precipitous bank catch hold of a woman’s feet; she may trip and plunge irresistibly into the drink, no matter how her friends and neighbors call to urge her to put forth hands and swim to shore. She may drown in those heavy waters, taking her babe with her. But the women go on in cheer, doling out comfort as if we were all safe and could skip along the border, and as if no river with its buried currents and fatal slap of waves on stone flowed nigh. That was dear to me, a thread of consolation braided together with alarm and adventure—for an adventure into extremity it surely is when a babe goes traveling the short yet difficult distance from womb-waters to air and life, and when a woman must strive to do the daunting thing of turning herself, as it were, inside out for the sake of a child, and all the while meditating on Eve, barefoot in the garden, the first taste of a banned fruit singular and pleasant in her mouth.

  The two girls took turns reading from the shorter catechism of the Westminster Assembly—The sin whereby our first parents fell from the estate wherein they were created was their eating the forbidden fruit—and sang some psalms they had learned by heart, gripping each other by the hand and singing the louder when I cried out, as I meant not to do but did all the same. In the short lull between one sea-wave of pain sinking away and the next building and rising, I remember asking, “How much longer, how much?”

  “Perhaps,” Mistress Faulkner said, “an hour?” She looked to Goodwife Dane when she spoke.

  “No more than two,” Deliverance Dane said. “Surely no more than that. More likely an hour.”

  A great swell of panic washed over me. It came to me that I could not live through another hour of trouble, that I must die if the waves did not cease. So I thrust harder than ever before, shrieking when the pain came as if I could rid myself of agony by noise, by insisting, by wailing. I had a fear of dying badly that was as acute as any fear of death; more so, I think, for in death I would be like my family, and take the unborn with me.

  “The crown, I spy the crown!” Goodwife Dane shouted. “Now comes the time to hurl the babe into the world!”

  By then, I felt sure that I could not shove such an enormous substance as a child out of my womb and into the light.

  “You are safe now, praise God,” Elizabeth Johnson said, her hand on my arm. “The babe is in a fair position. It will be soon.”

  Those words came when I had given up on my trouble ever coming to an end, either in life or death, and felt that the drum in my belly would never cease its enormous vibrating, and that torture was the unending hell of being a granddaughter of Eve—to lie as on a rack, as if each limb were torn asunder. I forgot Jotham Herrick and what had happened in Falmouth, forgot Goody Holt and her carping, forgot the Saltonstalls, forgot Phoebe Wardwell and her babe under the ice. All I could remember was the heroic, often-told story of a noblewoman who had prayed and labored for fourteen days with a wrong-facing child and at last died. And all I could do was to beg God for relief from an orb of seething distress trapped inside me—for an end to the need to expel this relentlessly throbbing planet.

  The girls’ piping voices rose to a crescendo: Behold, I was born in iniquity, and in sin hath my mother conceived me.

  But the women raised me up, and the child slithered into the world and was caught in a cloth by Goodwife Dane, the babe shining and slick and letting out a trembling whoop that was greeted by the outcries of women, and they crowded close to see him. She handed him to Mistress Faulkner, and knelt before me to tug gently on the cord until the rest was delivered.

  And although there was a bustle of girls bringing drink and meat and cakes, and aproned goodwives wiping at the babe with cloths and, indeed, a whole world of earthly untidiness with someone praying in the background, the chamber seemed quiet and somehow distant to me, the naked babe like a rose in a caul of blood-streaked white, and the whole room bathed in candlelight, for it was night again before he was born. Eventually, after the cord was clipped and made fast with a knot, I watched as the women passed him from hand to hand, transforming him from a soaked, glistening creature into a little citizen of the
world with clouts and cloths and bands of linen to hold all the gear in place. Betty Johnson settled a biggen on his head to keep in the warmth, handing him to Goody Carrier, who placed the babe in my arms.

  The world came near again.

  Abby and Francis were singing in high, tuneless voices.

  I looked and looked as though never having seen such a common thing as an infant before, as though the curve of a cheek and the flash of a deep-blue eye and the soaked darkness of a newborn’s hair had not been invented until now. And I memorized him, every spike of lash, every curve of feature, though certain I could not hold the image, for the faces we love blur and are lost in time.

  “Thanks be that travail has ended,” I whispered to the babe, who no doubt already sensed in his marrow that the world was propelled by strife. Had he not been cooked in my belly as an English alchemist cooks his mixture, and been fired out into the air with shocks and pangs, so that his first attempt at a word was a cry? And had we not won the victory despite the rack of birth, when the limbs are plucked asunder?

  Though I thanked the God of divine power and mercy for that deliverance, though I swam in the midst of a sea of rescue and joy, though I knew that all good things are gifts from out of creation, I still pondered what it meant that some mothers were to live and some to die—and I remembered that day in the wilderness when it came home to me that Christ hangs on the Cross with arms extended to embrace a world of pain, that divinity is no cosmic tinkerer, and that God had not pushed the French and Indians in our direction and made sure that I was an Ishmael, alone and beleaguered in a wilderness.

  My thoughts had circled that idea again and again with some fear, as I had no wish to be regarded as defying my church. Mr. Dane, though, had spoke differently of their fate, and had not called my family doomed by the Almighty. And now I had survived once more when I might have died.

  “Who can know?” I murmured.

  “Do you need anything?” Mistress Faulkner had heard me and come to see if I had any desire for food or beer.

  “A mouthful of drink, prithee.”

  “With all my heart,” she said. “You must be as dry as grit and old cobwebs.”

  I lay back and watched the women bestir themselves, cleaning up the room, preparing to call in my husband. They had called me a twofold hero for fleeing in the wilderness and for making it through this other dark forest where so many wander and die. Perhaps if my parents had not brought me up to admire the heroic suffering of those who remain true to their promises despite torment, I would have died on the way from Falmouth, or else in childbed, not having strength to push on.

  “You flower,” I said to Samuel, for his face was the very color of a rose that my grandmother had carried on the ship from Boston and planted near the door of our house in Boston, though she did not live long enough to see it grow and bloom.

  Goody Waters once told me that in England, our midwives were often cunning women who made use of magic—potions and incantations, charms and amulets and Mary Magdalene girdles. They made the room uncanny with little rites of propitiation to unknown powers. How strange to labor into the night with such chanted rhymes, such queer belts around the belly! The Cottons and the Mathers and all the tribe of ministers of Boston had put an end to such superstitions. They cared more about the soul’s salvation than about rescuing the body from an earthly martyrdom, and so they commanded the colony midwives to put the soul first.

  Secretly I wondered whether we could not care about both the body and the soul without magic and without displeasing God, who had formed and knitted them together out of a great pleasure in making something from nothing and in setting the world into motion. And when I looked at my child, I saw the true enchantment of birth, and was soon as fond of looking at the shape of his nose and eyelids as I had been of dreaming over Jotham Herrick after the first time we were alone together. That the babe was helpless and far from the competent exercise of a rational soul only increased my affection and desire to keep him near and safe.

  But Deliverance Dane and Abigail Faulkner came to bear him away to the meetinghouse to be christened during the afternoon services on the third day of his life. I was glad that the day was sunny, for the talk in town was still of weather signs and a bitter winter to come, and the temperature was unwontedly cold. The two would stand together as midwife and present the child. They dressed him in a gown and a thin cap beneath a biggen, and gave him dry clouts and wrappings. The whole was bound in a bunting of skins from rabbits snared by Jotham Herrick, who was as handy in such work as any man in the colony.

  “Samuel cried little,” Deliverance Dane told me later.

  “There was just the frailest skin of ice over the water in the bowl,” Abigail Faulkner said, “and he sang out a trembling note at the touch of cold and then was quiet and good.”

  “Imagine there being ice at the close of August,” Goodwife Dane said. “It is a chill I do not recall. Our young minister is already talking about this winter as a judgment upon sin, but I hope that it will not be so severe as he threatens. But Mr. Dane told us to carry the babe straight home and put him to bed beside the fire.”

  “It is hard to be brought into the Body of Christ through ice and cold water,” I said. “I pity any babes born this winter, if it is to be such a cruel one.”

  “You may be interested to know that the midwife is busy with your friend Goody Dane. And Mr. Barnard said to our father that he hopes the child is not born on the Sabbath,” Deliverance Dane said, leaning forward in her chair as if telling a secret.

  “Goody Dane? You mean Mehitabel Dane? But her child is not due to be born until October, or so I heard tell.”

  “All the same, come he may,” Goodwife Dane said. “And none of us who are of Danes by blood or marriage were asked to attend. And that seems to me passing strange.”

  “She let go of her love for me, and I have never known the why of it. Perhaps Lizzie and Goody Holt turned her against me. She seemed a friend and such a bulwark against her mother, who never cared for me. I do not know what happened, except that Mehitabel Dane was greatly shocked by Goody Wardwell’s death, and I was present that day. You know that I found the mother and babe in the well. She misliked that it was me to discover them. Perhaps she did not like to think of that hour ever again. But I wish her an easy time in her trouble.”

  “God willing, you will have more and longer-lasting friends,” Deliverance Dane said, “who shall not part you from their love.”

  “Thank you, Goodwife Dane. But before you leave, tell me more about Samuel and the christening.”

  I thought of my Jotham Herrick, still sitting with the men at the meetinghouse, and perhaps his thoughts on me as mine were on him. He was my best of friends, surely, and the earthly king of my heart, as I was queen of his. I looked forward to when my healing time was over and we could be fully together day and night, as when we were first married, before I was with child.

  “The boy did finely. He opened his eyes wonderingly at Mr. Barnard and sighed.”

  Abigail Faulkner got up and went to the cradle near the fire where our little Samuel Herrick was now sleeping off the excitement of the morning. “And everyone close enough to hear sighed back, all together, as if singing,” she added. “I have never seen Mr. Barnard so overcome. The tears came into his eyes.”

  “But it was our good old father who christened him, not Mr. Barnard, though they stood up together.” Goodwife Dane smiled at me, perhaps guessing that I would rather her husband’s father had done the act. “And Jotham Herrick looked fine and tall, and proud of his son.”

  “He was named for Mistress Herrick’s father, I suppose.” Mistress Faulkner was still kneeling by the cradle, her eyes on Samuel.

  “Yes, and Mr. Herrick says that there will be other chances for his own name, which also belonged to his father in turn. Jotham is a good name,” Goodwife Dane said.

  “King Jotham raised castles and watchtowers in the forests of Judah,” I said, “though they did no
t keep him from being thrown down in the end. And so my Jotham was defeated for a time by losing his family. But like the king, he had the desire to build, though in gold and silver—smaller things—in the wilds.”

  “We would be poorer without his work with the militia and selectmen and metals,” Mistress Faulkner said. “You have both had trials and come through to a more peaceful life.”

  “Jotham is a strong name. And Samuel is a sturdy name as well.” Deliverance Dane rose and, shaking out her skirts, left the room, coming back with a cup of beer for me and sugared curd cakes.

  Afterward, she went to inspect the child.

  “Your little Samuel Herrick is a sound sleeper,” she said. “We carried him to sister Abigail’s house so that he would have a warm rest on the way here, and the babe never woke, not even when he was tucked into a cradle and lifted out again later.”

  “An adventure in the cool air and ice and water has fairly tired him,” Mistress Faulkner said, taking hold of her sister-in-law’s hands to pull herself up. “You should sleep also, Mistress Charis Herrick,” she added.

  “Twixt birthing and churching comes weeping and sleeping,” Deliverance Dane said, repeating an adage that may have been particular to Andover, as I had never heard it before. The godly had given over the practice of churching as ordained by the English in the Book of Common Prayer, so that there was only a prayer of thanksgiving after a month’s healing time. But the saying lingered behind in people’s mouths, if not in their acts. No doubt there was often weeping. I had heard from Deliverance Dane that Goody Farrington had been delivered of a stillborn boy, but that she lived.

  I fell asleep and dreamed that I wandered through the forest with Hortus, and under the trees sat enormous gold and silver teapots, salt cellars, and spoons large enough for giants. And in one of these lay a babe—mine—and so I picked him up and went on until I reached the sea, where I sailed away in a sauceboat with a linen clout for a sail, stiff with salt. We must have been blown clean out of this world, for I dropped anchor at a land of rustling silver trees. I walked among them with Samuel in my arms until I found my lovely Jotham Herrick, shining in the sun like a man cast in gold, and just as a voice like ringing bell-metal spoke to me, I wakened in sweet desire to see his face.