Charis in the World of Wonders

by Marly Youmans

  The women from my lying-in went whisking in and out the shop and house for Samuel’s first month, making sure that I rested. By the close of those weeks, I longed for nothing more than to be alone with my husband and son, though I was glad to feel stronger again, and to have had their help and counsel for many days.

  Goody Mehitabel Dane’s child was, indeed, born on the Sabbath, which Mr. Barnard said was a reproach to depraved parents, though Mr. Dane replied that children came when they came, and that to believe a birth on that day meant that the parents had engaged in bodily congress on a Sabbath was the sheerest superstition and not cited in Scripture or proper to the laws of nature. Mr. Barnard said that all three, the two new parents and the old minister, had profaned the Sabbath and were all of them doubting Thomases, though I did not find the least evidence of truth in his words. The news of that falling-out surged over the town and took many days to ebb. I also heard that child Anne was small and puny and likely to die, and that she was in some way imperfect. And I was sorry to hear of it and wished the babe strong and whole, and that Bel Dane and I could still be a comfort, each to the other. But it was not to be, it seemed, or at least not yet.

  One morning I went to her house with a gown for the infant, embroidered with a white hawthorn flower. Goody Holt opened the door with Anne in her arms.

  “You are not welcome here,” she said coldly, and spat a generous quantity of moisture and phlegm onto the stone before the door, narrowly missing my petticoats. “Goodwife Mehitabel Dane now knows what you are and will not be taken in by your ways again.”

  Though she took the garment from my hands, she cast it down on the boards and made as if she would tread on it. But she held back. And that made me glad, for her daughter would see and know my work. Goody Holt was unlikely to throw away fine needlework, no matter how much she disliked me.

  Ignoring her ill nature, I stepped onto the sill.

  “What a pretty babe,” I said, hoping that she would be satisfied with those words and tell Bel Dane of them.

  “She came too soon, runted and dwindle-limbed, and she is blemished. Is that what a woman like you admires?” Goody Holt moved the little gown with the toe of her foot. “You deceived Mehitabel Dane with your charms.”

  I glimpsed what she meant, and what I had heard spoken of, a firemark on Anne’s cheekbone, ruby red and round.

  “Who would not love such a sweet face? Look at those delicate features. I do not believe she will fail to be loved because of a jot,” I said.

  “Cain was marked, was he not? And Satan leaves his stain on many a newborn, they say.” Goody Holt pursed her lips tightly.

  “Who are they? I do not think this tiny Anne Dane was inked by the Devil,” I said. “She looks sweet, sleeping in your arms. Could she not still be tranquil and pleased with her lot, beloved by her parents and the Father of mercies?”

  “Go on with you,” Goody Holt said sourly, thrusting her face into mine so that I stepped back and found myself outside.

  Her mouth relaxed into a smile as she kicked the door shut. I heard the babe give out a wail that rose to a shriek and sank into the distance.

  I stood before the door, breathing hard in surprise and anger, images of the gown on the boards, the babe, and Goody Holt’s vindictive mouth in my mind before I moved slowly away. “Love your enemies,” I muttered; “bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which hurt you.” But I did not feel at peace.

  On the way home, I thought about those words and how hard they are to carry out. And what did the old woman mean, saying that I had deceived Bel with my charms? I had been nothing but truthful, it seemed to me, though no one is without faults and all people fail to see themselves clearly. Could she mean witchcraft charms? But I had nothing to do with such risky behavior—unlike her own daughters, who had been lured by fortune-telling. It was impossible to fathom the cause and the depths of her dislike of me, and I only hoped that her ill nature had not permanently poisoned Bel Dane against me.

  In the end I had pity on Goody Holt, for who could bear to be her or abide near her for long? Surely she was her own bad punishment. Could she not even take pleasure in her daughter’s child? And so I found the thread of compassion for them: Goody Holt, who did not want to be a tanner’s widow but a high-born lady with silken clothes for herself and her children; Lizzie Holt, who had desired but failed to win my dear Mr. Herrick; and Goodwife Mehitabel Dane, who wanted many robust children but was disappointed in her first babe. True enough, a firemark was suspicious to the godly, but many a woman or man with a misfortunate blot showed forth as fair as or more fair than the unblemished. Sad for Bel, I hoped that she would find some love for little Anne. She liked children; surely she would welcome this one, if not now, later.

  But Jotham Herrick and I were pleased to be happy in our little man and, as September progressed, passed hours of amusement and sometimes tears with him—for even the most royal of all children will cry and, soon enough, smile and kick against his bindings. Samuel slept or waked in the cradle as we worked in the room behind the shop curtain. We spent hours discussing the merits of Andover, and whether we should move to Haverhill and live near the Saltonstalls. Always it was Mr. Herrick’s obligations to the town selectmen and the local militia that held us from the last choice. Also, I had a value for Mr. Francis Dane, though many preferred the younger minister with his talk of remarkables and the secret work of Satan, now and then bursting forth to burn down the feeble frames of God’s people. The Dane family attracted me, and now that I had spent such childbirth hours with a portion of them, I felt closer to their town.

  “Such a babe for luck,” Jotham Herrick said, watching as Samuel drank from my breast, round eyes intent on mine.

  “When he sleeps, sir, we could put the back-in-a-bit placard on the outer door,” I said.

  “You are a wonder, madam.” He stretched out his arms as if tired of being cramped in one position to work. “A proof from wonder-working Providence that the world is better than we commonly know.”

  As I gazed on him, the light caught his shock of hair so that it was gilded. Despite the loss of friend Bel Dane and the fleabites of Lizzie and Goody Holt, I was content in my husband and child, in my small steps into the learning of the silver, in my few books and possessions, in my Sabbaths, and in my ordinary days. I was more glad than seemed quite right after all my trials, and determined in that very instant that I could lodge in Andover with Jotham Herrick until my life ended.

  “Put the sign on the door? Yes, we should do that, wife,” he said. “I am weary of pressing my tools onto mere silver.”

  “Perhaps you should turn to incising gold.”

  “I think not. How could I not prefer my wife with her skin of milk flecked with nutmeg and the rich fire of her hair?” He bent to the engraving again, a crooked smile on his lips. I watched him, enjoying the strength visible in his arms and the delicate fingers that could perform such dainty work. His pale gray eyes made me feel newly awake and alive when he shot the bolt of a glance at me.

  And so, often and often, we closed up the shop for an hour, sporting together in joy, glad that all was well, that we had made it through the months when a man and a woman must restrain desire and think on birth and death and so ready themselves for either, and that we still had each other. Golden fire leaped from our very pores, and we burned as one. Our lives seemed to us fragile but perfect that fall—not perfect in the sense of without flaw but perfect in that we felt whole and complete, together or apart. As a young wife, I was ravished by my husband’s mortal beauty, and, I believe, he by mine. For youth is princely, shapely, and comely to the eye. The child Samuel napped or fell asleep at night to the lullaby of wolves in the nearby forests, and woke to cry for milk or company in the cradle near the fire. I loved to play with him and to fimble his cheeks and forehead that were living silk for smoothness. He was pale-haired like my husband but blue-eyed, a token of how we had spent so many hours, our limbs glowing
in the curtained dark.

  9

  Path in the Dark

  Andover and Haverhill, mid-November 1691

  One afternoon in November, I was practicing the small art of engraving names on a piece of silver; Jotham Herrick was out on several errands, collecting a debt and delivering already-purchased silver to the Faulkners. Fed and newly cauled, Samuel lay wide-eyed but quiet in his cradle near the fire in the back room.

  I heard the shop door fling open and, as it seemed, a great torrent of people burst inside.

  “There she is!” Lizzie Holt shrieked as I passed through the curtain and into the shop.

  “Mr. Herrick is not in,” I began, puzzled as to why I could see Mr. Barnard and Bel Dane and so many men in the large company that had crowded into the room. Surely it was some town business, and none of mine.

  A great squall of voices blew through the room, so much so that I could hardly make out what was happening. “Under suspicion,” Mr. Barnard was saying, but I could make out “send away for the magistrate to Boston” and “accused of strangenesses.” Oddly, some of them were talking of Goody Wardwell.

  Lizzie Holt shouted them down with the words, “All her family died, and she rode through the nights and the wilderness to get to Haverhill. Is that not cause for mistrust? How nimbly she flew across rivers and through forests! Is that not near magic? Do not the dark hours belong to the Evil One? And has she not an uncanny skill with the needle—and red hair, the mark of Satan’s roasting-flame?”

  Mr. Barnard could be heard, his voice irritable, saying, “You there, Goodmen Osgood and Ballard, escort that young woman to her house. She has herself come under question for wielding sieve-and-scissors for fortune-telling. Her words are no right help to us.”

  “I am an essential party to this—” Lizzie Holt protested, but the two men ushered her out the door, though I could still hear her shouts, even after she was gone, diminishing as she was herded down the street.

  Mr. Barnard pushed his way forward to where I was standing, startled and alarmed but not yet fully understanding my case. He was dressed in sober De Boys with a fine white lace-trimmed collar, but his clothes were rumpled and askew, as if he had been woken from a nap.

  “In the absence of magistrate and several of our town officers,” he began, “it has been decided that you must be taken into custody and kept secure for the night, just until the return of the constable and others.”

  “Where is Mr. Francis Dane in all this?”

  “We need not bother my elder brother pastor with this matter, though I imagine he will be acquainted with the news soon enough,” he said.

  “I would value his counsel but trust you will speak well on my behalf and not be swayed by what must be the calumnies of those who do not love me. I have done them no wrong.”

  “If you have done no evil, you have nothing to fear,” Mr. Barnard replied. His words gave me no feeling of assurance.

  “Of what am I accused? I have not hurt anyone in Andover, nor do I intend to do so. I have lived a most harmless life here. What is the source of this censure and reproach?”

  “She asked Goody Wardwell again and again if she would have water,” Goodwife Bel Dane called out, pushing through the crowd until she stood near Mr. Barnard. She would not look me in the eye. “I was there, and she said to Goody Phoebe Wardwell that she would be thirsty if she took nothing to drink. And this Mistress Herrick was the one, when we were all of us searching and calling but could not discover her hiding place, to find out Phoebe Wardwell and her babe in the water—in the drink—with the ice sealed over her face. You see? She was given water to drink, and so she died.”

  I was surprised to see how gaunt Bel Dane appeared, her skin now too big for her flesh. My thoughts were on her face rather than the words. Then her meaning sank in.

  “Surely you do not think I had anything to do with how—”

  “There is more. My sister says that Charis Herrick has consorted with the dark and uneasy shapes that hide and frolic in wilderness. We know it to be likely. Is not the night evil? Do we not creep inside at the curfew bell? We do not know how or why her kin died. We do not even know if the French and Indians—”

  “That will not do, Goody Dane,” Mr. Barnard said with considerable asperity. “Though all happens for a purpose, you cannot blame the survivors of a French and Indian massacre for having caused that destruction, for having shot and clubbed the victims. You may say the weight of judgment was there, yes, but no more. For nearly the whole community of Falmouth was slaughtered in those wretched days, and it was chastisement of our colony but also a tragedy for us all.”

  I dried my eyes on my apron, and even now I am unsure whether I wept for my family or for the betrayal of friendship.

  “But there is yet more,” Goodwife Dane said.

  I stared, unable to fathom what more she could hurl against me.

  Mr. Barnard stretched out his hand, pointing toward her face. “What do you mean?”

  “She has a doll that she keeps always, a needle pierced through the cloth. A blood spot mars the face. My babe was born too soon, and she has a blemish on the same part of her cheek. And you have seen it on her flesh, Pastor Barnard, the firemark of Satan.”

  At last she looked at me. I saw no shame for what she was doing on her features. And there was no love for me left, none at all.

  “That I kept because my mother was making it, and the spot of blood is from my sister, who was—”

  No one was listening. Some surrogate for the missing constable had given an order, and the men in the group scattered and began to ransack our rooms. Mr. Barnard called out to them for calm, but no one slowed in the frenzy.

  “Go home, Goody Mehitabel Dane, and you other women,” Mr. Barnard said. “Your testimony will be wanted later on, but for now go in peace.”

  “I am innocent of wrongdoing.” I said softly. Who would there be to hold me dear, with Jotham Herrick absent and all else dead? The godly are like fierce pikemen who close double ranks around family when trouble comes. But who did I have to speak truth for me? Samuel began to cry from behind the curtain.

  Soon only Goody Dane was still standing in the shop room. Why did she not leave?

  Suddenly I felt the same as when I abandoned the ruins of our home near Falmouth, that I was utterly alone in the world and without a help except that God might care for me. My enemies lay close at hand, ready to ambush my steps. Just as the psalmist wrote of himself, I was like water poured out, my bones out of joint, and my heart wax. Only an hour before, I had been bidding farewell to my husband and leaning over the silver, trying for a smooth line, and now the world was plunging away. But I knew already that the ground under our feet is never sure, always subject to fire and quake.

  As near Falmouth, I had an intense desire to weep that made my whole body ache. But I would not cry more, not in the presence of this woman who had once been my friend.

  “Would you have an innocent hang? You have done evil to me,” I said to Goody Bel Dane. “At least when the Sachem of the Narragansetts meant to attack Governor Bradford of the Plymouth Plantation, he did him the honor and kindness beforehand of sending a bundle of arrows wrapped in rattlesnake skin, a sign which there was no mistaking. I have seen and borne a great wrong before, and now I see and bear one again. This time it is your ill, unkind, and savage doing, you who should be my friend.”

  She did not answer, though a flush came into her cheeks. In the strange way that small things that do not matter tug at our attention, even in the most dire situations, I noticed a stain on her bodice and remembered how Goody Holt had scolded her more than once as a lazy slattern. She seemed to waver as to whether she would come closer or speak, but turned away and swept from the shop.

  “My Lord, may I never see her face again,” I whispered.

  Shouting went up from our bedchamber, and one of the men came back waving the small wooden case in which I kept Mary’s doll. Jotham Herrick had given it to me. The throng of other
s tumbled into the shop after him, each crowd-brave and eager to glimpse the evidence of Satan passing among us.

  Goodman Woodbridge appeared flushed and gleeful as he held up his discovery.

  “Here, here is the poppet with the needle and the firemark!”

  Mr. Barnard pushed through the press of men, took the box from him, and inspected the doll.

  “At first look, this seems a macabre and strange witchwork like a corpse in a coffin,” he said. “And the needle and the blood are there, as Goody Dane described.”

  “I have kept it, sir, for the love of my mother and sister and no other reason,” I said. “The doll was never finished, and my sister Mary died. That is a drop of her blood. It is no witchwork.”

  “Perhaps so, madam,” Mr. Barnard said. “I pray it may be. You must answer proper questions before we go further.”

  The man who had found the case asked, “What shall we do with her?”

  “Wait for Captain Bradstreet and Constable Forster and the others to return from Boston,” said one, and “Take her to Salem Village” or “Salem Town” or “Boston” said others. They did not want me in Andover.

  Was I to be arrested and indicted? I had no confidence that a woman charged as a witch would be treated fairly, for I recalled the story of an unfortunate woman who had been accused and hanged in Boston, though my father said she was simply poor and bedlam-mad and had been a healer in her youth. But a nervous wife had been pricked by an unseen pin, a pail of milk was spoiled, and a well-known gossip believed she had seen the old woman hopping about in the brush near her house in the shape of a prodigious raven, with eye and beak so large they could only mean that a witch had shifted her form into the shape of a bird.