As the day’s shadows deepened into evening, I sat in my dark corner like an invading spirit and followed their movements about the house. From under my lashes I watched my two cousins, Margaret and her brother, Henry, studying us in turn. Henry was thirteen, slender and dark. To my mind he was furtive and a sneak, and often when Aunt was not looking, he would poke at Hannah or cause her to fall. Once, when he thought we were alone, he crept up behind me and pulled hard at the tender hairs on the back of my neck. My eyes watered but I said nothing and waited. The next morning he found the piss barrel upended over his shoes.
My aunt was also dark, as dark as my mother, but her face likened to my grandmother’s. For where my mother’s eyes showed an unyielding defiance, Mary’s eyes showed, even in the midst of laughter, lines of sadness, giving her a softness and a sweet melancholy. Mother had said she had lost three babes in a row. They could not ripen in her womb and at the turning of the third month were washed away in blood and tears.
Uncle Roger was as unlike my father as any man could be. He was of average height, slender, with somewhat delicate hands for a farmer. He had a high forehead, the dome of which was prominent, for his hair was receding on top. He had more books and pamphlets than I had ever seen in one house. He had an old, well-thumbed Bible, works by Increase and Cotton Mather, almanacs for planting and sowing, and other tracts, printed on the thinnest parchment, telling of news of the colonies. He smiled often, which to me was notable. But the most remarkable thing about him was, where my father was silent, Roger Toothaker was ever talking. He talked from rising in the morning until he retired for bed. He talked through meals and around whatever chores he set his hands to doing through the long winter hours in the house. And it must be said that Uncle never seemed to sharpen an implement or tool a leather harness without handing it over to Henry to finish. It was as though the drudgery of handy-work crossed his ability to weave a story. I remembered watching my father split a cow’s hide and stitch it into the shape of a new plow harness in the time it took my uncle to fasten a buckle onto a brace.
That first evening at supper I sat in our far corner with Hannah heavy on my lap. The meat was so tough I had to chew it well to a pulp before placing small bits of it between my sister’s lips. She yet had few teeth, and Aunt was out of practice making mash for a baby’s mouth. The squash was well baked and Hannah sucked happily on a piece of it, the grease sliding down her hand onto my apron. Uncle had paused in his meal and, pushing his chair back from the table, stretched out his legs. Henry looked with slanted eyes over his shoulder at me before saying, “Tell us the story of the wandering soldier’s ghost, Father.”
“Oh, no, Roger. It is too late for such as that,” said Aunt, her mouth turning down at the corners. She caught Henry taunting me with an ugly face and pinched his hand. Uncle sat looking at me beneath heavy lids, the grease on his mouth and chin glistening orange and yellow in the light of the fire. It gave him the look of someone baked in a furnace. Margaret had turned to look at me as well, her dark hair making a curtain over her face. But the tense arch of her neck like a strung bow signaled to me, Do not hesitate. So I spoke out, “I am not afraid. Tell your story.”
Uncle slid his arm around Margaret’s shoulders and said, “It seems you have a companion spirit in your cousin Sarah.” He pushed his plate away and looked at the grain of the wood on the table as though a map had been spread in front of him.
“In the lowering twilight around some lonely and isolated village, much like Billerica, the dark gathers and gathers until the only light to the living comes from a few early-evening stars overhead. The light of a candle casts feeble shadows around a windowsill. The very air about the village fills with the terror of some yet unseen presence, the terror flowing like some rippling fog about the houses, the pastorage, the burial grounds. Soon every tree with its shattered limbs appears like some armed enemy. Every stump, a ravenous devourer.
“A thin and bony soldier appears from out of the purpled forests of oak and elm. He is dressed in torn and wretched clothing, wrapped in gory linen from ghastly wounds, going doorstep to doorstep through the village, begging something to eat. The only words he whispers at every door are ‘Hungry, so very hungry.’ A kindhearted woman hears his piteous pleas and returns with a plate of food, but he has disappeared from sight. Then, before going to bed, some foolish parent forgets to bolt and lock a door. A child, a redheaded child, who happens to be nine years old, like Sarah, wanders from the house carrying a sweetmeat for the brave soldier. In the morning the alert is sounded. The child is missing. After searching, the men in the village find only a shoe torn with sharp and jagged teeth, part of a petticoat matted and bloody, and a skein of bright red hair. Nothing more is ever found of the girl and it is many years before the hungry ghost is heard from again.”
I had grown up hearing the lusterless warnings of old women to shy away from glens and bogs after dark, as these low places are known to be visited by spirits of the dead. But the pitch of my uncle’s voice had been a kind of music. Not the dull, confining songs of the meetinghouse but a music both musky and dark. His words created a weighty tension in my chest as if I were a small fish hooked through the breastbone and pulled against the current of some unnatural course onto a strange and dangerous shore. The rude and simple furnishings of the room seemed richer. The warmth of the fire and the cinders stirred up from the fire were like a golden wool. The little black panes of window glass had turned to garnets and topazes in a giant’s ear. Hannah began to protest and struggle against my clasped hands and I let her slip to the ground, saying, “Why would the hungry ghost eat a child when offered village food?”
“Why, indeed,” replied Uncle, laughing. “To question shows an active mind. But be careful, it is sometimes better not to ask, and be satisfied with a tale well told. Especially if you value the good opinion of the teller.” He said the last in all seriousness but he winked at me and I felt as though his arms had embraced me.
Later, as I lay on my pallet, the rise and fall of Uncle’s voice was fixed in my head, though he had long since gone to bed. I would sleep deeply and well through the night, but the cup of my imagination was not yet filled, for the next night my dreams would keep time with demons.
THE SECOND DAY I felt idle and cross with nothing useful to do and I wanted very much to open one of the small, leaded-glass windows and toss Hannah out into the snow. The only respite came after supper, when Uncle told of his adventures in King Philip’s War, and then only after we had begged and begged him to tell it.
“King Philip,” he said as he moved round closer to the fire, “was the English name given to Metacom, chief of the Pokanoket tribe. This chief was proud and haughty and believed he could drive out the English settlers. The war began in a village near Bristol in ’seventy-five. Indians had butchered a settler’s cow and the settlers followed by killing an Indian. The Indians then revenged themselves by knocking over the head the farmers and their families, and so began a trail of murder that would destroy settlements for hundreds of miles.” He ticked off the names of invading Indian tribes, sounding like a shuttlecock striking a wooden weaver’s frame.
“Nipmucks, Wampanoags, and Pokanokets all began raiding villages and homesteads in the territories of Rhode Island and Connecticut and Massachusetts. A thousand men assembled by General Winslow marched as neat as you please into Indian territory, and it was with this group of men that I served as an officer’s surgeon. A Narragansett camp was soon discovered in the woods by advanced scouts. Now, it’s true that the Narragansetts had been a peaceable tribe until that time, but their great numbers caused the New Englanders much unease and it would only be a matter of time before they roused themselves to join their dark brothers. So, in the early dawn hours, a tree was felled over a stream and our forces swarmed quickly into their camp.
“The killing was swift and complete. Every last Narragansett brave in the camp was packed off to hell. By nightfall the ground was so slippery from the bloody matt
er of the shootings and the knifings that man and beast alike could not stand upright on the snow. I myself killed six or seven before the day was complete. The marvel was how easily they were dispatched. We placed their heads on pikes and left them in the ground to give fair warning to the other tribes.” He stopped for a moment to light his pipe with a taper pulled from the hearth. His exhaled breath sent smoke from his nose down his cheeks, and he pitched a ragged, suffering note to his storytelling.
“A certain Captain Gardner had been mortally wounded in the head and chest during the battle and would allow no other physician but I to attend him. Blood ran down his face in rivers where his skin had peeled away from his skull like a soft-boiled chestnut. I lifted him up and called him by name. ‘Captain Gardner, Captain Gardner, can you hear me?’ He looked up at me, his life force flowing out of his veins, and thanked me for my service. He died in my arms. We carried him back to Boston, where he was buried with all due honors.”
We all sat in silence and watched the firelight on white birch form dancing pictures of massacres in the snow. Henry then said, “Father, show us the scar from the battle.”
Aunt frowned at this, but Uncle cheerfully opened his coat and shirt to reveal an angry scar that cut downward across his chest, just under the left nipple, to the tender part of his belly. As he tamped out the remaining embers of his pipe, he said in closing, “Only a year ago during the coldest months were Schenectady to Salmon Falls to Falmouth attacked by the French and Indians. Hundreds were killed and captives taken. Women with child ripped open, their babes dashed on the rocks. People think that the winter season forbids the stirring about of the Indian” — and here he looked up at me — “but it seems the snow and cold does not keep them from our door.”
Suddenly Aunt called out, “Enough!” Her jaw quivered as she hurried to draw the bolts on the door, and the look in her eyes spoke of days and nights spent in fear of such a raid coming to the Toothaker farm.
That night I lay staring into the darkened room, every sound, every shadow, turning to creeping horrors. I pulled Hannah against me as a shield until I thought my scalp would crawl off my skull with fright. After many hours I fell asleep and began to dream. I saw the terrifying faces of Indians, their skin painted as bright as any scarecrow, forcing their way into my grandmother’s house, carrying with them impossibly long and sharpened butchering knives. It was to my family they had come, but I could not sound the alarm, for my body had been left many miles behind. I watched them gather around my brother Andrew’s cot and saw the sheet pulled back from his head. He lay there unmoving, his pale blue eyes resting in the middle of a bloody mass that had once been his face. Every bit of flesh had been flayed from his muscles, skinned as neatly as an autumn hog.
When I opened my eyes, Margaret was kneeling next to me, her face solemn, her eyes wide and unblinking. I began to cry and she bent down close to my ear and whispered, “Come and sleep with me.” Together we carried Hannah into my cousin’s room and crawled into Margaret’s bed. She held my hands between her own and breathed her moist, warm breath over my fingers. Her breath smelled sweet, like porridge with sweet-gum syrup poured through. Her lips curled up in a knowing way, her eyes slanted to a drowsy pitch. “No one tells stories like Father. He weaves them out of the very air. But I have stories to tell as well, Sarah.”
Through the matted light I could see the delicacy of her, the smooth whiteness of her skin, as she talked. Her voice was low and strangely hoarse as she hummed some bit of nonsense. She placed her arm tighter around my shoulders and pulled my head to her neck like a piece of lump metal to a polished lodestone. We fell asleep, the three of us close together, Margaret’s fingers wound tightly with mine. We woke to my aunt standing startled over us, saying, “Margaret, what have you done? You have put yourself in danger.” We lay there, looking at her as if she were an intruder in her own home.
“There is naught to do for it now, God help us.” She knelt down by the bed and said a silent prayer. I looked to Margaret, but she smiled and nodded, and I believed in that moment that Aunt and Uncle would come to love me as well.
From that time, there was not an hour that passed that I did not compare the fullness of my days with the dryness that was life with my own family. Where mine was reserved to harshness, Margaret’s was lavish with praise and care. Where my parents were silent or sullen, hers were animated with talk and laughter. And even though Margaret’s laughter was directed at me at times because of some slowness or ignorance on my part, I believed it made my own wit grow all the more, like a copper coin that is rubbed to greater brightness with a rough cloth.
Being with Margaret was like standing inside the casing of a lantern, one that kept the warmth in and the stinging insects out. I refused to think it peculiar if at times, gazing up at the tops of trees, she nodded to the air and said, “Yes. I will.” Or if, in carving out little hollow places in the snow, she placed her ear close to the ground to listen to some music only she could hear. I did not think it strange, because she was lovely and had claimed me. And because she was mine.
Once, when I was five, my mother had harvested a large crop of early pumpkins, more than we could keep without their rotting. We chopped them into fragrant pieces, salted them, and fed them to our cow. The milk and cream that she gave for many days was yellow-orange and tasted as though someone had ladled honey into the milking buckets. That was how it was in the presence of my cousin’s family: their sweet and salty natures mingled themselves with my own, leavening my suspicious and prickly nature.
My cousin and I did everything as with one hand. Whatever work one of us was sent to do, the other would find some strategy to accomplish that same task, so that Uncle would often say with great relish, “Ah, here come my twins.” And Margaret and I would laugh as we looked at each other, she with black hair and skin like potted cream and I with my flaming hair and spotted face. The only time we separated, waking or sleeping, was upon the Sabbath, when Uncle and his family went to the meetinghouse. Hannah and I could not accompany them, as we were meant to be home in Andover dying of the plague. My sister and I would wait, house-bound and bored, eagerly watching the road for the Toothakers to return to us again.
It snowed hard that winter, and the drifts often buried the house and barn within a few hours. Before sunrise every morning, we would clear a path to the barn with shovels and bowls or with our bare hands. Once a path was cleared, Margaret and I would walk hand in hand to the creek that ran hard by the house to get water. The snow was deep along the creek banks, waist high, and if we fell into the drifts our clothes were wet to our skin. Breaking through the crusted ice to fill our buckets blistered my hands, and however hard we tried, however big the hole, the following day the creek would be covered again with ice. Margaret always wore her mittens to save her hands from the snow, which made me loath to place my calloused palms into her own seamless ones. I would look at my hands and feel ashamed of their hardened places, the cracked and bleeding skin around the knuckles. But she, after kissing each fingernail in turn and slipping her own mittens over my hands until they were warmed to life, would sing in an odd, lilting way, “And thus I am you and you are me and I am you again, you see.”
Drinking the water from the creek was like biting into a piece of metal that had long been buried in the snow, and it would sting the back of our heads if drunk too deeply. After taking water to the house we would with Henry’s help lead the animals out one by one to the stream. I fear the animals suffered greatly from thirst as we hurried them, urging them back to the barn to save our frozen hands and feet.
Margaret’s family had more livestock than did mine. Their barn was not large but had been well built with the help of the oldest son, Allen. Allen did not yet have his own farm but lived and worked in north Andover in the house of his friend, Timothy Swan. He came often during planting and harvest seasons to help work his father’s fields and share in the yield. It would be Allen who would someday inherit Uncle’s farm. In their barn w
as a milk cow, two oxen, a large hog, her belly swollen with a litter soon to come, three chickens, and a rooster.
Uncle also had a large roan gelding that he used only for the saddle. He said the horse was too finely bred for a cart. One of Henry’s chores was to keep his father’s saddle well cleaned and oiled. Once he showed me a place just under the horn that had been nicked half a dozen times by a sharp knife. Henry whispered to me that these marks were the number of Indians his father had killed with his own hands during King Philip’s War. He ran his finger along the small gouges in the leather and bragged, “Someday this saddle will be mine, and there’ll be a dozen marks on the horn before I turn twenty.” I looked at him through slitted eyes and wondered how he was to accomplish so great a murdering task, because he had no great strength and no full measure of courage. Perhaps, as he had done with Hannah and me, he’d ambush them all from behind.
When Uncle came into the barn, he always brought some fine treat, a piece of dried apple or some kernels of corn, for his prized gelding, Bucephalus. It was the name Alexander, the Greek king, had given to his favorite war steed. An apocalyptic horse, for where the horse went, so went Alexander’s troops, bringing the fire of battle. The name meant “Oxhead,” which made me laugh, as the gelding had a very small, neat head. Uncle would wag his finger at me and say, “Ah, but there is the word and then there is the spirit of the word. Bucephalus is so called because I see in him the spirit of bravery. I see the world, Sarah, and call it by what I feel it should be, not by what others who in their dull reveries think it is.”
“So, should I now call you Alexander, Uncle?” I asked slyly. He laughed but I could see that it puffed him up. I did not know then that Alexander had been poisoned by his troops.
The Heretic's Daughter Page 4
