The Heretic's Daughter (17 page)
But I did not yet want Mother to know what had happened. I could not bear the knowing look that said, “You see, I was right about your uncle.” I looked down at the bucket and saw it had not spilled much. My dress was torn under the arms, but I could say I had slipped and fallen and so pass scrutiny. I had to calm the beating of my heart, for just as Mother was keen in knowing the changes in the weather, so was she clever in finding out my hidden thoughts. The best way to escape notice was to stay close to my brothers. I would lose myself in the mix and fray of their clattering movement and become like a board piece in a game of Nine Man Morris, a game that my father loved well. The goal was to line up three pins in a row, jumping your opponent’s pins quickly and with a great show of confidence, confusing and weakening the other player. The winner was the one to remove all of his opponent’s pieces first. It was a game of cunning and forethought, but the key to winning was to keep moving.
No one that night regarded my torn dress, although Mother asked me, as she scrubbed at the wounds in my hands, if I had fallen into a ravine. But I was soon forgotten in the press of welcome as Robert and his niece appeared, and from that time until late we stuffed ourselves with suckling pig and flat cakes. Father had trapped two beavers, and we had their tails on a cast-iron platter, shimmering and bubbling in rivers of their own fat. We ate ribs of smoked venison, cracking open the bones with our fingers to suck out the rich marrow. And when we were full to bursting, Mother brought out a pasty she had made with sugar and wild rhubarb that was both sweet and sour together. Richard sat awkwardly with Elizabeth on a bench by the fire, both too drowsy and shy to speak.
I fell to sleep with my head on the table and was carried to bed, my hands sticky and red from the rhubarb. I woke once during the night and remembered it was the
17
th of November and that I was then ten years old. I felt under my pillow for Margaret’s sampler wrapped around the pottery piece. I crept out of bed and softly climbed the stairs to the attic, careful not to wake my brothers, and placed both the cloth and the shard in the bottom of my grandmother’s trunk. I closed the trunk and felt my way, shivering, back to bed.
Winter came in hard and fast towards cock’s crow. I could hear the rising wind rushing in like a maid late for her own wedding, the snapping and rustling hem of her skirt scattering snow and ice across the frozen ground. Sleep soon found me, and when I woke again, the drifts of snow were so deep as to shrink the boundaries of our world to house and barn.
It was one of the coldest winters in many years, and it spread from our new world to England and from there to the countries of the Dutch and the French. The Belgians and Prussians alike shivered in their beds while the Papists in their northern countries danced a jig to keep their feet from icing to the ground. The Indians stopped their warfare and for the whole of December left the Boston Colony at peace, and the frontier towns let down their guard to celebrate quietly and soberly the birth of the world’s savior.
But in the next village of Salem some young girls, in the comfort and warmth of their minister’s home, banished the boredom of their confinement by creating a forbidden Venus glass. With the help of a West Indian slave they told one another’s fortunes and answered to their satisfaction such little questions as Who will be my sweetheart? or Who will marry me? The eggs were dropped into the glass, the water was stirred, and the spin within that fragile vessel would form a vortex into which the good and the evil alike would be sucked down and drowned. And from that time, I would often think of hell as a very cold place.
January 1692–May 1692
O
N THE 25TH
of January a messenger kicked the flanks of his horse bloody as he rode south towards Boston along the Ipswich Road. In his saddlebags he carried a packet of parchment edged in ash and smoke. Forty miles to the north in York, Maine, one hundred and fifty Abanaki Indians had attacked settlements along the Agamenticus River. Hundreds of families were burned from their beds, most still wearing their nightclothes. The Reverend George Burroughs of Wells, a neighboring village, gave the Town Fathers of Boston nightmarish descriptions of the slaughter, with pillars of smoke, raging fires, and the hacking apart of some fifty souls, among them the town’s minister. At least eighty young women and men were taken away by the Abanakis into Canada. Some were later redeemed, some were never heard from again. Reverend Burroughs knew well the Town Fathers, having earlier been the minister of Salem Village. He felt it his duty to write of the attack, as many of the dead had relations there. It would be these same relations who would later arrest him, try him, and hang him for witchery.
But we would not hear this news of attack until February. January was spent in isolation, and, despite the hillocks of snow and ice blocking the pathways to town or to our neighbor’s door, we all felt a creeping sense of well-being in spite of Mother’s firm belief in tempering exuberance over good fortune. Whatever she tended, whether at the fire or at spinning, she had a distracted, calculating look on her face, and I knew she was mindful of spring. We had meat and wood to last many months. And in the attic hung hard little seeds, dry and suspended in their muslin sacks, sleeping their Lazarus sleep.
Late in the month Hannah pulled down a pot of soup from the edge of the table, where it spilled onto her neck and chest. The skin curled and bubbled up, and if Mother had not ripped the smock from her body I think she would have been forever scarred. Hannah lay on our bed for most of a day and night, crying and twisting away as Mother and I soaked rags with water and chamomile for her burns and forced teas of mint and lavender down her throat. She cried and cried, and nothing I did could calm her until Mother and I lay down next to her. Towards dawn she drifted into exhausted sleep, holding my poppet in her blistered arms.
I must have fallen asleep as well but woke when Mother got up to stir the coals for the breakfast fire. My brothers and Father were yet sleeping, so I watched quietly from my pillow, my arm still cradling Hannah’s damp and fevered neck. After the coals were fed Mother walked to Grandmother’s oaken sidepiece, the carved vines appearing as ogres’ faces in the dark, and pulled from a drawer a quill, a pot of ink, and a large red book, one I had never seen before. She leafed through many pages filled with a dense and flowing hand and settled on a blank sheet at the end. She dipped the quill into the ink and began, in tiny letters, to fill the page. Her writing hand was her left hand and very fine. It turned and flexed on her strong wrist like the delicate head of a Moorish mare above its muscled neck. Her fingers were long and tapered and the bones beneath the flesh made me think of a story Uncle had told me last winter of a young woman drowned in a millstream, her bones coming to rest on the shore by the great wheel. The miller’s son made a harp from her breastbone, stringing the frame with her raven hair and anchoring the strings with pegs made from her long white fingers. And whenever he played the harp, it spoke in the drowned woman’s voice and sang of how her sister had come to push her into the river. The story gave no hint why the murder should have been, but Aunt later whispered, out of her husband’s hearing, that the reason must have come in the form of a man.
Mother’s black hair, graying only at temple and crown, spilled down her back and blended seamlessly into the shadows hanging hooded and dense from the rafters above. I wondered what kind of music my mother’s bones would make. I had no doubt the words would be as strong and relentless as a booming surf over tidal rocks, the music as weighted and cold as the easterly ocean. Perhaps, I mused, if I could learn the music, I could hear her deeper thoughts, just as a fisherman trains himself to the sounds of the incoming swells, which tell him of crashing waves or a calm, welcoming sea. Carefully sliding myself from the bed, I tiptoed softly to where she was sitting and asked, “Mother, what are you writing?”
She had been at her ease until that moment but started at the sound of my voice and right away closed the book. Placing it back into the sidepiece, she said, “It is only the counting book. Go to sleep, Sarah. It is early yet.” As she turned away I knew she was being untruthful about the book. It held something more than the number of barrels of corn or baskets of potatoes stored in the cellar and, as it was filled to its last pages, had been her companion for a very long time. We sat in silence, waiting for the cock’s crow, when we would begin the baking. Her face was ruddy from the fire, a fine sheen of sweat like a beaded diadem on her forehead, her deep-set eyes on the firewall beyond the hearth. She seemed so collected in her own skin, so separate and apart from me, not needing or wanting the small exchanges of family comfort. Her outer life was as circumscribed and homely as any villager’s in Andover, and yet I wondered what surging restless thoughts pressed behind the expressive bones of her brow, enough to fill the pages of a book. In a whispering voice I said, “Will you teach me to better write?”
She looked at me, surprised, but said, “If you want. We shall start today, before supper.”
I ventured cautiously, “Why do we not see. . .” I stopped, waiting for some warning word or gesture that I was not to talk of Uncle’s family. But she reached out with one hand and smoothed flat the skirt over my lap, brushing away all the shadows hiding in the folds.
She said, “You mean to say, ‘Why have we seen so little of Margaret?’ ” I nodded and she cradled her elbows in her palms and looked away. “Your uncle has been made shameless with hard drink and has neglected his wife and children. The elders of Billerica have given him more than one warning to better tend his family. We have offered help many times but were refused, and resentment grows where help is not wanted.”
“But why should he refuse us?” I asked.
“There is great enmity between your uncle and father.” She paused but did not say why this should be. “And now,” she continued, “there is greater reason for Roger Toothaker to hate us. We have been given this house because your grandmother came to know the worth of your father over a man who calls himself a healer and a man of God but spends his days with a cup in one hand and a bawd in the other.”
Now I had a new word for Mercy and I said teasingly, “And all of this is in your great red book?”
She took my elbow forcefully and said with an edge, “You must never speak of the red book to anyone. Promise me now that you will keep this one thing a secret, even among your brothers. Promise me.”
The only secrets I had ever kept were girlish confidences with Margaret. But here was a different thing. My mother was demanding of me to keep a secret about a large leather-bound book of which I knew nothing. Her face was backlit by the growing flames from the hearth, and though her eyes were in shadow, I could feel her questioning gaze. It was the first time she had asked me for anything beyond the labor of my two hands. I nodded and whispered, “I promise.”
She raised a forefinger to her chest, tapped it several times, and then pointed to me, the movement of her finger forming the illusion of a thread connecting us, breastbone to breastbone. She said, “Someday I will tell you what is in the book, but not today. Come, it’s time to start the baking. I hear your father stirring.”
She turned away but I could yet feel the glint of fear in her, like a flame inside a hooded lantern. I did not see the red book again for the whole of the winter, but I kept my promise not to speak of it.
We started our lessons that day as Mother had promised, and, as she was patient with me, the scratchings of my quill soon grew into passable letters. Sometimes as we sat at table side by side practicing some tiresome Bible passage, she would place her left hand over my right and guide it from chaos to order, and I came to seek out the closeness of our bodies. What I dreaded most was copying from a catechism book by the great Cotton Mather, passages such as “Heaven is prepared for pious children; Hell is prepared for the naughty” or “What a sad thing ’twill be, to be among the devils in the Place of Dragons.”
When my fingers could no longer write she would read to me so that my head would increase in knowledge, much as a pillow casing will swell, the more goose down is forced into it. She had a little tract of poems by a woman named Anne Bradstreet whose works had been published by an Andover pastor. Late into evening the words became a boat on which we floated, out past the cornfields covered over with snow, out past the murmet unclothed and barren but for the drifts wrapped round it. Out beyond great marbled stones that slept under ice until the warming action of the earth in spring forced them tumbling to the surface.
To sing of wars, of captains, and of kings,
Of cities founded, commonwealths begun,
For my mean pen are too superior things;
Or how they all, or each their dates have run;
Let poets and historians set these forth,
My obscure lines shall not so dim their worth.
With her reading done we would sit in silence, perched together on our bench, our minds wandering far away, and I would rest my head upon her shoulder and she would let it lie there for a while.
T
HE LAUGH WAS
a childish thing. It burst out loud and injurious over the reverently meditating parishioners. The stunned Reverend Barnard was poised at the pulpit, his mouth open as if to call back into his throat the pious words he had only just released. His eyes searched me out but he did not know me at first. Some goodwife sitting in front turned her head around and hissed at me as one would hiss at a yowling cat.
I had not meant to laugh. I had been sitting quietly listening as the Reverend repeated a sacrament-day sermon given two Sundays before by his colleague Samuel Parris in Salem Village. The daughter and the niece of this Reverend Parris had begun having strange fits, and it had been given out that the girls were under an evil hand. I had listened with delicious fearfulness as he told of the girls’ torments as they twisted and cried out or fell motionless upon the floor. At times they were bitten or pinched by unseen agents and at other times they raced about their rooms, leaping into the hearth as though they would fly up the chimney. I had looked up into the rafters, wondering if the invisible world was even then gathering to make mischief in Andover as well. Reverend Barnard had called for a day of fasting and quoted from Psalms, “Sit thou at my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool.” And with those words I had pleasant thoughts of propping my shoes up on Phoebe Chandler’s backside. My eyes wandered to the gallery above and I spied sitting there the little black slave boy. He was looking at me as though he had been waiting only for my gaze to meet his. The orbs of his eyes crossed and he stuck out his tongue, the tip of it passing beyond his chin. I smiled at his antics and he started mimicking the Reverend as he preached his sermon, exaggerating every movement of his face and body. Just as the Reverend would lean into the pulpit and point to some member of the congregation, so would the boy lean forward and point his finger at me. And when the Reverend’s eyes gazed heavenward to invoke the Almighty, the boy rolled his eyes upwards in the thrall of a palsied fit. And so I laughed.