My Name is Resolute (29 page)

The midnight bell tolled. The room took on the quiet of resting souls and Sister Joseph snored peacefully. I dressed on my knees beside the cot, got on my shoes and tied my parcel of clothing. I looked toward Sister Joseph and bade her a silent farewell. I put up my hood, raised the wet blanket over my head, and pushed open the shutters at the farthest end of the building from her. It squeaked. I paused. The rain slowed. At last I stepped over the sill. Halfway to the kitchen, the sky opened and rain came as if it might never rain again.

I ran right into one of the yew trees; it was closer than I had imagined. I stopped to picture the place where the kitchen would be. I could just make out the shape of the other tree fifteen feet away. Not being able to see meant no one else could, either, safe in the cloak of rain. I neared the kitchen, raised the blanket, hoping for a familiar object. At once, a hand took my arm and fingers closed over my mouth, the blanket was held over my head and my whole person was quite lifted and moved. I fought mightily. I gave every effort to scream yet I was not able to make a sound.

In the midst of my struggling I heard a voice, a woman saying, “Resolute, be still. Keep quiet. Let her go, now. Not a sound, Ressie. It is I.”

“Patience! Who had me? That was not you. Why was I captured that way? I had almost reached the kitchen.”

“The others are eating. Plenty of people and food to keep everyone busy. We go.”

I turned at her last words and ran into a man. Tall and hard as an oak tree, he was the source of the leathery iron hands that had taken my mouth and held me just moments before. An Indian man. I let out a gasp and drew a breath to scream.

Patience shook my arm. “Ressie! Quiet. I told you, we are leaving.”

“Is he going to let us go? Is he here to capture us? Sell us again?”

“Run for the gate,” she said, took my hand and pulled. With her other hand she clasped the Indian man’s hand!

I stopped so suddenly I slipped from her grasp and the two of them nearly fell down in the mud. “Where is baby James?”

“He is better off here. Rachael will care for him. I cannot.”

“He is your baby.”

“You do not understand, I know, but he is better off here.”

“What if Rachael runs away and leaves him? Is there a foundling home?”

“Then he will be kept here. Come now, Resolute, or stay behind. I will not wait for you and have us all found out. It will go badly for everyone if Massapoquot is found to be helping us.”

This was not what I imagined. This was wrong. I had to turn back. I would let her go. If I went, I would never get home to Ma. I would marry some farmer I knew not, and bear children and grow old and die here in this frozen hell. “Baby James,” I said again. “We will go get him.”

“We cannot take a baby,” the Indian said, in perfect French. I was amazed for I expected the same halting words they used in English. “We travel hard and fast. You must come now or stay behind with the child. No other choice.”

“Ressie!” Patience shook my hand impatiently.

I could not see Patience for the downpour. “Are we going to Jamaica?” I asked.

“As close to it as we may,” her voice answered out of the gray. She waited a few seconds, and when I could not answer, she took my shoulder and followed the length of my arm with her hands, grasping my fingers in hers. “Farewell, then, Ressie. I love you. I will always think of you. I have to go. God keep you, little sister.”

As if unbidden, my hand squeezed hers. “Take me with you,” I pleaded. With Patience on one side and a man I knew not on the other, they propelled me out the gate I had found long ago, into the hands of three other Indians. One led the way up the road, and turned into the woods where a narrow path cut this way and that. We marched through the dark night until the rain stopped just as the sky turned a lighter shade of gray. The air chilled so that our cloaks and coverings froze upon us, making tents of ice. I could not feel my fingers or my feet. We moved as shadows, on and on, until one of the men called a halt. I heard water. A river appeared out of the fog. Long bark canoes, two of them, waited at water’s edge. The Indians put Patience into one canoe and me into the other. My heart sank. Would they take me into the woods and press me with their desires and kill me?

I sat in the floor of the canoe while one man before me put a rough deerskin with the hair still on it over me; a man behind me took up oars and rowed. As the hours passed I slept. The sun broke through the heavy clouds from time to time, playing warm spots upon my face. Home, I thought. We are going home. I thanked God. Thanked the Indians, too. I asked the Virgin to guide our canoe, whispering, “Ma, I’m coming.” When the sun lowered, the Indians pulled their crafts to a bank and made a small camp. They lit a fire that seemed to give no warmth at all. Patience sat near the man who had caught me at the convent. I recognized him in the firelight. He was the one whose wounds she had tended with her hair. I whispered, “Patience, do you know these men?”

Patience smiled, her eyes alive and twinkling. “Every few months, Massapoquot and men of his tribe travel to Montréal to bring slaves to the convent of St. Ursula. We were part of one group. When they came, Sister Marta had all of us in the kitchen stay up for two days, waiting upon and feeding the men who had worked so hard to save our souls from Presbyterian hell.” My mouth opened, appalled. She continued, “Every time I saw him, I felt something different. We began to talk. We knew each other. His name for me is Red Shield of Bear. When Massapoquot offered to come and take me I made him promise to get you, too. We have planned this for four years. That first rumor those two sisters would try to escape, that was you and I. But the weather was against us. Even the Indians do not go abroad when there is four feet of snow on the ground. I could not call you if there was no hope of making an escape.”

“And they will take us to Jamaica?”

“No. But they will get us near Boston. There are ships there aplenty for you.”

I huddled by the fire. “What about these other men? Do they speak French?”

“Yes, all of us,” Massapoquot said.

I looked him in the face. “Why may I not ride with Patience? Why do I have to sit in the other boat?”

The man laughed. “Why would I have to do all the work? Why, you would make them feel as if they weren’t useful.”

There was so much to think about, yet I was so cold I thought I would die of it, and I could not think. Patience had left her own child behind. She would have left me, too. She had convinced four strange men to take us to Boston and no one had mentioned coins or gold. I wondered how much it would cost, or if she had traded her virtue yet again for this journey. I could not imagine how her mind and heart were connected to my own, for all the workings of hers seemed too foreign to grasp. What was to keep these men from doing anything they wanted with us and dropping our dead bodies in the river? I said a prayer for James and begged forgiveness for leaving him behind. We rode in canoes, then walked overland, with the Indians carrying the canoes on their shoulders until we came to another river.

Eleven days we went down the river, the men paddling, Patience and I frozen to the bone. Twice they made us lie down and heaped things upon us as if we were a pile of trade goods, and one of those times, Massapoquot had to talk long and fast to some other Indian men so that we could pass unmolested. The twelfth day they banked the canoes and hid them in tall brushy plants that overhung the river. Massapoquot said, “From here, travel slow. This is English land. You speak some English; you might say them we are not here to kill you, but Englishmen bad. They will kill, no matter you have their hair and skin. They not listen. You,” he said to me, “choose you come with us. You choose. Not have to live with English. Think this.”

“Yes, we will think on it,” I said, trying not to appear as morose as I felt. I smiled at Patience, thinking that perhaps she had been right to trust him, or perhaps she had lied to them to get the Indians’ help in escape. I wondered for the first time whether our absence had caused a stir at the convent. “My sister and I long to see our mother,” I said. “I can smell the flowers of Jamaica, already.”

We lived off dried corn bread and berries for five more days. We did much resting and eating, and though it was cold, they seemed in no hurry. We stopped at a road where the air was filled with the fragrance of wood smoke and bread baking. Massapoquot pointed. “There. English town. This place one road goes two ways.”

Patience put her arms around me and hugged me. “Go to that house there, and tell them you prevail upon the selectman to provide you food and shelter until such as you desire to go on.”

“Is my face dirty?” I asked.

“No. You look fine.” She sighed. “Let me see you once again. Yes, you are fine. Almost a young woman. Another year, well and aye.”

“Then I am ready. Let us go side by side, Patey. Thank you, gentlemen, for the journey. God will bless you for what you have done for us.”

Patience said, “Go on, Ressie. I will watch you go, then, before we leave.”

“You are not coming with me?”

“Ask for the selectman’s house. Here, take this, too. I shall not need it.”

“Patey?” Deep, wrenching, inconsolable sobs shook my whole frame. She removed her apron and fastened it about my waist as I moaned, “What shall I do without you, Patience Talbot? We are meant to go together.”

She wept. The Indians wept, too, I remembered later. Patience said, “I am going with my husband, Massapoquot. We wanted to bring you to a safe place. There is a town not far from here. My old petticoat is sewn inside that apron. Everything Ma gave me is yours.”

I stared at Massapoquot while pointing with one hand toward the house up the road. “Husband? What if these people are Quakers? What if they hate Catholics?”

“You are not a Catholic.”

“I do not know what I am. I am lost.”

“Someone moves in the field,” one of the Indians said. “English. We go.”

I bit my lip. She was leaving with Massapoquot. I felt as sure as if I had heard a holy voice, whatever Patience chose to do I must do the opposite for the good of my everlasting soul. As they stepped toward the woods, I stood fast. The men took Patey’s arms and slipped into the cold shadows under dark red maple leaves.

The dappling of light and red as a screen before my sister, her red hair loose over one shoulder, painted an image as I could carry in my mind for a lifetime. She looked bewitched, fairylike, part of the forest itself, a face enchanted.
Au revoir!
I called.
“Au revoir.”
I stood alone in a field of cornstalks and chaff, my heart broken, my eyes red. “Patience!” I cried. A crow flew overhead. Higher above, a
V
of geese squawked at each other. After many minutes, I pulled in my tears and pressed the backs of my hands against my eyes, cooling them, turned away from the woods, and moved toward the house.

CHAPTER 14

September 29, 1735

I knocked at the first door, an unpainted thatch of boards tied in place over a hole in a low stone cottage. The top half swung out at me. A gnarled hand held tight to a knot of rope, ready to pull it fast. A couple crowded themselves into the open half-doorway. They appeared more ancient than the sagging beams and rusted iron circle above the door. When I inquired were we not in a town, they looked to each other and drew back from me. “Are ye a witch?” the old man asked. “Come ye out from the woods like that, with no one to guide ye, and no horse, and naught but your bundle?”

“Did you kill our laddie?” his wife added. “He was thrown in a well by a witch.”

“No, Goodman and Mistress. I was a captive, just escaped. I found my way here with the help of—of others. I am hungry.”

The man twisted his sparsely bearded chin, then angled his head to ask, “A brownie are you, then? If we feed ye will tha’ grant us a wish?”

“I am neither fairy nor brownie. I am but a girl in need of a roof and some soup.”

“How did you know ’twas soup on the hearth?” asked the goodwife. “She’s fey, I tell you.”

“It is always soup,” I said. “Oh, please, turn me not away. At least show me the direction of the town.” Were I them, a young woman coming alone from the forest, not in rags but clothed and fair, carrying a bundle such as I had, may have seemed such an odd apparition I could not blame their superstition.

“Eleven miles. That way,” the man said, pointing to a window on the back wall where the dull light of morning came through the only opening save the door.

“Is there a road, sir? I wish to get to Boston. I am told that it is a great seagoing harbor.”

“Of course there is a road. This is not the wildi-ness, ye know.”

“Will you gi’ us a blessing ere you go?” the woman beseeched.

“I know not one,” I said. I drew back.

“We’ve done ye no harm, little one. A blessing?” She came from the house then, with him on her heels, and bowed her head. I was at least a foot taller than either of them. The man looked upon me with fear but the woman was willing to share her dread with hopes of magic.

I imagined if I said nothing, they would think that I cursed them instead. I spoke a phrase of the mass:
“Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritus Sancto; sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum, amen.”
I stopped myself making the sign of the cross, fearing that would give away the origin of the words.

The man waved his hand, one finger extended, toward the road. “Go on, now. Town’s that way. Eleven miles. Ye will find the Great Road. We done ye no harm, remember that. No elf ever suffered at our hands, tha’.”

The road wound through places almost too narrow for a horse-drawn rig, but it was not eleven miles to the town. Indeed, within half a mile I came upon a house and then another, their lands trimmed and perfect as the gardens at St. Ursula’s. A woman waved to me from behind a split-wood fence. I returned the salute, then she called to me, “Are you travelin’, then?”

“Yes, to Boston to find a ship,” I said.

“Alone?”