Animal Appetite

by Susan Conant

  But I did! Among other things, although Hannah had supposedly been inspired by God to deliver herself, Mary Neff, and the boy Samuel from the clutches of the so-called savages, she’d not only scalped ten human beings, but had waited twenty-two years after doing so before finally becoming a full member of her church. In 1697, when Cotton Mather preached a sermon lauding Hannah Duston as the defender of Zion, he also took her to task: “You continue Unhumbled in Your sins,” he’d said. Hannah had been baptized as a child. Not until 1724, when at the age of sixty-seven she dictated the “Confession” I’d read at the Haverhill Historical Society, did she offer the proof of conversion needed for full membership in the church. I had no illusion that in chastising Hannah Duston, Cotton Mather had shared my doubts about the goodness of her character or harbored my suspicions about her family. Even so, I wondered whether in squeezing her into the mold of New England’s heroine, Mather, who’d heard Hannah’s tale firsthand, hadn’t found her a tight fit.

  What I hoped for in the obscure old book, And One Fought Back, was not a Rita-style analysis of the dynamics of a radically dysfunctional family, nor did I expect from the author, Lewis Clark, the kind of conclusion that Oscar Fisch would probably have reached: that if Hannah and Elizabeth had only joined the recovery movement and found solidarity with other survivors of parental abuse, Hannah would’ve ended up waiting to be traded for a hostage or contracted a bigamous marriage with one of her captors, and Elizabeth would’ve spared the babies and founded a proto-support group for unwed mothers. All I wanted was additional confirmation that as music ran in the Bach family, as dogs ran in mine, so violence ran in Hannah and Elizabeth’s.

  In the book, I found facts I’d read elsewhere: Hannah was almost forty years old when taken captive. By then, she’d borne twelve children. The oldest, a daughter of about eighteen, was also named Hannah. A son, Timothy, was two and a half. After Hannah’s release, she and her husband, Thomas, had a thirteenth child. Her parents were Hannah and Michael Emerson. She was their oldest daughter.

  I encountered a few oddities and discrepancies that had now become familiar to me. Was the newborn Martha Duston included in the count of Hannah and Thomas’s children? According to Clark, she was. When the assailants slew the baby, did they smash her head against a tree, as most accounts claimed, or, as a few said, against a rock? A rock, Clark said. Some inconsistencies I’d learned to ignore. Duston, as Clark explained, was variously spelled Dustin and Dustan; inconsistent spelling, it seems, was common in that day. As Clark realized, Cotton Mather had inadvertently misled generations of scholars by giving the date of the massacre and scalping as April 30; Mather had meant March. The boy captive who joined Hannah and Mary Neff in the killing was Samuel Leonardson, Lennardson, or Lenorson; Clark used Lenorson.

  As to facts, I learned nothing new. Like his predecessors, Lewis Clark had missed the connection that Laura Thatcher Ulrich had made in her book: He clearly hadn’t known that Hannah and Elizabeth were sisters. I felt disappointed. Elizabeth had identified the father of Dorothie, her first child, as a man named Timothy Swan. She’d brazenly called the baby after his mother. So far as I knew, she hadn’t named the father of her twins, but had denied her second pregnancy and, when charged with infanticide, utterly denied her guilt: “I never murdered any child in my life,” she’d testified. Clark, however, didn’t even mention Elizabeth.

  Like me, Clark had tried and failed to discover the name of the tribe or clan that had captured Hannah. What surprised me was both the thoroughness of the scholarly account and the engaging style of the writing. Lewis Clark cited his sources. Better yet, like Good Wives and like The Unredeemed Captive, his little privately printed account brought life to Hannah’s era. Of Thomas Duston’s decision to save his older children instead of his wife and baby, Clark wrote with neither Dwight’s undisguised admiration nor my own skepticism. Hannah herself emerged as neither heroine nor fiend. From the little book, I learned no facts. From Lewis Clark, who died in the Battle of the Bulge, I learned a lesson in shunning moral judgment.

  CHAPTER 27

  That same Thursday evening at dog training, instead of emptying my mind of worldly thoughts to contemplate the Infinite in Kimi’s deep brown eyes, I found myself preoccupied with violence. Not that I practiced it! Not since my most recent religious conversion, which took place at a revival-tent obedience seminar led by Patty Ruzzo, who preached the gospel of the ears-up, eyes-bright, correction-free method so passionately that I was vaguely disappointed when Patty didn’t ask us to approach the high jump, cast off our dogs’ choke collars, and vow to go forth and jerk no more. Even without actually impelling me to speak in tongues, Patty got across the Good News that I could train with nothing but positive reinforcement and really didn’t have to hurt my dogs.

  I suspect that all converts have the same experience I did: Doing good proved comparatively easy. The hard part was not sinning. I’d been training with food and smiles for years; I had no trouble dishing out yet more treats and sweet talk. The malingerers were my left wrist and my big mouth. All on its own, my hand would jerk the collar, or I’d say something negative. Then I’d beg Kimi not to tell Patty.

  Because of my current preoccupation with violence, dog training that night was a little less relaxing than usual. Also, I felt guilty about Rowdy, who knew that Kimi had gone with me to have fun while he’d been left out. Consequently, when Kimi and I got home, I fought my fatigue and set out for a little compensatory walk with Rowdy. To avoid offering him false hope, I decided not to take Concord Avenue toward the armory, where the Cambridge Dog Training Club meets, but followed Appleton to Huron and turned left.

  The night was bitterly cold and dry, frigid, with no promise of snow. I wore my down parka and heavy fleece mittens. In his permanent double-layered coat, Rowdy pranced along with a smile on his face, enjoying a temperature reminiscent of the ten below that he relishes. In the manner of all real dog people everywhere, I talked nonsense to him about his mending paw and Leah’s chemistry course, and otherwise gave him a full explanation of why he’d had to stay home and miss his treats, his praise, and the pleasure of my company. In the manner of all male dogs everywhere, he concentrated on marking every hydrant, hedge, and utility pole we passed. The construction on Huron Avenue that had presumably caused our rat invasion had been a boon to Rowdy, producing as it had a sudden proliferation of traffic cones, big orange barrels, and stacks of black pipe that he’d welcomed as a kind of manna sent by God to relieve his starvation for fresh objects on which to leave his scent. Now, in December, the work had ended. “It’s very unfair that they took your orange barrels,” I was babbling in empathic outrage. “The Lord giveth, Rowdy, and the Lord taketh away.”

  “Bullshit!” The deep, hoarse voice cut through the rumble of a passing truck.

  “Bullshit yourself!” I muttered, thinking that if fools chose to eavesdrop on private, privileged, and sacred communions, they had only themselves to blame for what they overheard. Then I realized that the voice emanated from a half-block ahead of us and that in any case the white noise of the traffic had masked the words I’d meant for no one’s ears but Rowdy’s. Glancing ahead, I saw parked near the minimart at the corner of Huron and Concord a dark panel truck. As Rowdy and I approached, the lights from a street-lamp and the store let me read the gold letters inscribed on its rear doors:

  MUSIC HAUL

  HARMONIOUS PIANO TRANSPORT

  KEYED TO YOUR RANCE

  Leaning sullenly against the open passenger door of the truck, Brat Andrews kicked the curb with one of her combat boots and repeated loudly, “Bullshit!”

  “Bronwyn!” The voice was a woman’s. “Who brought you up? Now, stop cursing and come and help! Gareth is not feeling well, and—”

  Brat, who stood in the gutter, replied, evidently to herself, “Gareth is psychotic! Gareth is out of his fucking mind! And so am I to have—” What made her break off was the sight of Rowdy, who, abruptly shifting to his ferocious guard-dog mo
de, pulled on his leash, wagged his way to Brat, sized her up, dropped to the pavement, and rolled onto his back in the hope of a tummy rub. Ignoring me, Brat bent over and scratched his white chest.

  “Holly Winter,” I reminded her. “Johann isn’t with you?” The question was perfunctory. Rowdy wouldn’t have missed the presence of a male Rottweiler.

  “I’m very protective of Johann,” Brat informed me. “I never expose him to noxious substances.” With a jerk of her thumb, she gestured beyond the door of the truck to three people clustered around a trash barrel at the corner of Concord Avenue. “Claudia, for example. Also, Oscar and Gareth. The Toxic Trio.”

  Oscar, who wore a dapper-looking overcoat and one of those fur hats you see on TV on the heads of Kremlin officials, stood a little apart from Claudia. Swathed in a bulky quilted coat, she hovered over Gareth, who, in turn, hovered over the barrel. With the deliberation of a connoisseur, he slowly fished through its contents. Tonight, he still wore the aqua backpack, but in place of the purple parka, he had on a long, formal-looking coat that I mistook for the jacket of a man’s evening suit. Claudia was chastising him in tones too low for me to hear. Oscar had his arms folded across his chest. I had the impression that he was trying to look bored.

  “He’s got the apron, too,” Brat informed me. She stretched her arms out to flex the muscles hidden under a heavy pea jacket.

  “What?”

  “On the coldest night of the year, my psychotic brother chose to dump his parka somewhere. What he’s wearing is the ceremonial regalia of a Freemason. Apron and all. One of Claudia’s neighbors saw him and called her, and when she got here, she called me from a pay phone, and I should’ve stayed the fuck where I was.” She thumped her hands together, presumably to keep them warm.

  “He’ll freeze to death,” I said.

  “He’ll go to a shelter, where they’ll keep him for the night and send him away in the morning with a parka that Claudia’ll be embarrassed to have him seen in. Ergo, her presence here. Ergo, his dumping his parka. He wants attention, he ditches something she’s bought him, he hangs around where one of her friends’ll see him, the friend calls her, she shows up, she makes a fuss, he gets what he wants.”

  “He really could freeze.”

  “That’s his leverage. Claudia doesn’t actually give a shit whether he does, but she’s up for tenure, and if her son freezes to death in walking distance of her office, there goes her image as the maven of child care.” In a fashion characteristic of Cambridge children of important people, Brat assumed that I knew what her mother did. She was, of course, right.

  “As it is,” I said, “Gareth doesn’t exactly boost her image.”

  “Bullshit,” Brat growled. “He elicits sympathy. Poor Claudia, gallantly struggling with blah-blah-blah. This isn’t one of Gareth’s better scenes. He usually pulls them in the Square, where there’s a bigger audience.” On his feet again, Rowdy was fixing Brat with that big-brown-eyes look designed to convince her that he’d discerned in her a special and wonderful quality of character that every other creature she’d ever met had somehow missed. She was compliantly resting a hand on his head. “Good-looking dog,” she said. “You show him? In breed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Conformation’s a lot of bullshit,” she said.

  With unpardonable disloyalty to a sport I love, I said, “Sometimes.” Hey, if what you want is loyalty, get a dog.

  “What are doing here, anyway?”

  “I live here.” Claiming the neighborhood as my own, I felt like Rowdy with one of the orange barrels. “I live down the street. And you? What’s your role in—”

  The heretofore silent Gareth suddenly burst forth with the kind of ranting he’d directed at me days earlier in the Square. This time, his object was Oscar Fisch, his mother’s second husband. “Son of a bitch! Son of a fucking bitch! Poisoner! Poi—son—er!” Wildly addressing a startled couple who were passing by, Gareth, in the manner of the Hannah Duston statue, pointed a finger of accusation at Oscar and announced, “This man, Oscar Fisch, murdered my father and married my mother!”

  The couple twittered nervously. “And I suppose your name is Oedipus,” the man murmured before scurrying off.

  Brat was still leaning against the door of the panel truck and resting her hand on Rowdy. “The interesting feature of Gareth’s delusions,” she remarked, “is that, in one way or another, they’re always grounded in reality. Claudia was cheating on Daddy. She married Oscar less than a year after Daddy died.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I started to say, then bit my tongue. The exchange we were having reminded me of an experience Rita once had after a vacation in the Bahamas. Returning to Cambridge, she’d gone to her office to see her first patient, a distressed woman who poured out sordid details of sexual adventures and fantasies to poor Rita, who hadn’t yet reoriented herself to what she did for a living and wanted to say, “I’m a total stranger to you! Don’t you realize that it’s inappropriate to tell me these intimate details of your personal life?” Rita, however, actually was a shrink. Why confide in a dog writer about your mother’s love affair? Because, I realized a bit belatedly, your brother is cracking up, you’re scared, you’re angry, and you don’t want your pain to show. “Your father had a lover, too,” I longed to say. “You have a teenage brother named Drew. He’s sane, friendly, and hardworking. He looks just like your precious Daddy.”

  Gareth, meanwhile, still raving at top volume, had switched from the blatantly Oedipal theme to the topic of Uncle George—George Foley—who, according to Gareth, kept drinking poison but still refused to die. When I’d encountered Gareth in the Square, hadn’t he said the same thing about his father? Claudia was cheating on Daddy, Brat had just informed me. She married Oscar less than a year after Daddy died. I’d assumed a connection: Claudia’s affair had been with Oscar, whom she’d married after Jack died. Had I misinterpreted Brat? Had Brat herself been wrong about the identity of Claudia’s lover? The elderly George Foley had been a handsome, charming man. Forty years his junior, I’d certainly felt the attraction. Eighteen years ago, he must have been even more boyish and vigorous than when I’d met him. Claudia had married Oscar Fisch. Had George Foley been her lover? Gareth’s delusions, his sister claimed, were always somehow grounded in reality. This man, Oscar Fisch, murdered my father and married my mother! Gareth had raved. Was it possible that a lover of Claudia’s really had murdered her husband?

  By now, Gareth had abandoned his interest in the contents of the trash barrel. He was pacing and circling widely and wildly around it, shaking his fist at Oscar, accosting passersby, and haranguing Claudia with disjointed tirades about Harvard, electric wires, and experiments with rats. As Gareth’s steps brought him close to us, Rowdy’s tail stopped wagging and his beautiful eyes moved from Brat to Gareth to me. With no display of anything at all—no growling, no raised hackles, not the slightest flattening of his ears—Rowdy took a few casual steps that placed him firmly between Gareth and me.

  Eyeing Rowdy, Brat asked, “This doesn’t bother him?”

  “Not much bothers him,” I said. “On the rare occasions that something does, he has it for dinner.”

  Gareth’s resonant, educated voice now sounded feverish. Pacing and circling, he reminded me of an animal in a zoo, a polar bear, maybe, exhibiting stereotypical behavior that worried his keepers. Trailing after him, his mother kept plucking at the sleeve of his Masonic coat. As one of his long strides brought him within a few yards of Rowdy, I heard Claudia quietly demand to know where he’d left his new parka. “Gareth, this will not do!” she scolded, as if taking her little boy to task for showing up after Little League practice without his new baseball glove. “Now, Gareth, listen to me! We bought that parka at Eddie Bauer only a few weeks ago. You picked it out yourself. Don’t you remember? We had such a nice time shopping for it. Now will you please stop and think where you’ve left it?”

  Gareth produced a monumental roar: “RATS! RATS AND POISON!�
��

  With a sort of placid toughness, Brat said, “Good. Once Gareth seriously locks on to rats, the end is in sight.”

  “What is the end?” I asked, intrigued.

  “I pin his arms behind him and haul him into the back of the truck. Oscar drives.” As if to illustrate, she nodded to Oscar, who’d distanced himself from the action and now stood by the curb as if he had no idea who these people were and was merely waiting for the next bus.