M
AY CAME FIRST
with storms and then with a great heat all at once. On the first of the month I sat in the shadows of the house, holding a skinning knife in one hand and waving away with the other flies that hovered over the corpse of a bear Father had felled earlier that morning. He had killed it with a clean shot through the neck, leaving the head intact. The brown milky eyes remained open in death, and his fixed gaze seemed to regard me thoughtfully, as though he did not begrudge our use of him. Another hunter would have bragged about killing a bear weighing twice that of a man and shot at a distance of twenty feet. A charging bear can run the distance of twenty feet in the count of ten. And knock a skull from its backbone in the count of two. But as Father hoisted the bear to a brace for the bleeding, I heard him recounting the story to Richard as though he had bagged a pair of geese.
It had taken my father and brother most of a day to take the wagon to Falls Woods and return again with the bear. Father stood close by, feeding the flames under the giant pot he would use to render pounds of fat from the meat. The meat would be dark and rank but it would dry better than beef and last longer than buck. When we had scraped the skin and combed the burs from the fur, it would make a warm winter coverlet for Mother’s bed. Father strongly believed in the curative powers of bear fat and would use it for everything from greasing the cart wheels to a poultice for Tom’s chest. Mother would add mustard seeds to the fat, heat it until it bubbled, and spread it on my brother’s chest before covering the stinking mixture with lamb’s wool. The blisters soon turned to scars but his breathing would ease.
I lifted my head to spy on Hannah playing nearby in the shade and saw Tom and Mother broad-hoeing the garden. They were planting corn, beans, and squash all in the same mounds together. The corn would grow tall and straight as a pole. The beans would vine the corn towards the sun and the squash would grow in the shadows below. Tom looked up at me and smiled, but his eyes had the look of Abraham’s son upon the altar, full of trust but somehow knowing the blade of sacrifice must come. He had grown bent and stooped in the space of months and was pitifully thin, the bones of his wrist jutting out at odd angles. Had it not been for the Reverend Dane and the Widow Johnson laying food at the doorstep, my family would have starved.
Andrew followed slowly behind, placing the precious seeds on the mounds and pushing them in with an unsteady finger. As he planted he sang in a voice reedy and thin a song he had heard Mother hum in the garden many times before.
One for the squirrel, one for the crow,
One for the cutworm and one to grow.
He had been much affected by the smallpox that kept him near death for three months. His face would forever be scarred and it would signify to the world that he would never again be at risk in falling to the disease. But his mind, which was reluctant to thoughts before the illness, had slowed to a crawling pace and would scatter like a flock of birds before completing a sentence. He would often stop speaking mid-word and walk away, leaving the listener unclear of his meaning or intentions.
I sat staring at my hands, shining and slippery with bear grease, thinking of Margaret’s hands over mine as we sat together sewing. Father called out to me to stop gathering wool and finish my work. I brushed away the biting flies and made a deep cut across the bear’s corded muscles to pull out another bit of fat. Seeing the fur stripped away from the bloodied flesh brought back the dream of the Indians bending over Andrew’s bed. And in that moment I knew with a certainty that it was Andrew who had brought the breath of contagion to Andover. Thirteen people, my grandmother among them, had died wearing to the grave the Devil’s rosy bridal bouquet on their flesh.
The selectmen had ordered that we leave Andover at the end of our isolation, but the Reverend Dane spoke passionately in our favor, as it was Grandmother’s last wish that we stay and care for the Allen farm. Because the Allen name was one of the oldest in the settlement, and because Reverend Dane begged for it, the selectmen bowed reluctantly to his wishes. But we stayed in Grandmother’s house mainly because my mother refused to go. Mother’s stubbornness would be deeply resented by our neighbors and, in particular, the new young minister of Andover, Reverend Thomas Barnard. He had for some time waited impatiently for the older man to step down and was thwarted as, year after year, Reverend Dane ascended the pulpit and preached to the congregation, taking half of the younger man’s salary. If ever there needs to be proof that a minister is a corruptible man and not a glistening saint, take away half his pay.
At Grandmother’s burying, Reverend Barnard had said to Mother, “Goody Carrier, it says in Romans that he who rebels against the given authority is rebelling against what God has ordained and those who do so will bring judgment upon themselves.”
And without a pause my mother coolly responded, “And does not First Peter say rid your selves of hypocrisy, envy and slander lest it bring to ruin the defiler?” From that moment Reverend Barnard would wish us gone forever.
I carried the heavy bucket of bear’s meat to the fire, where Father poured it into the cauldron for rendering. We stood for a moment near the flames as he stirred the mass of flesh and fat until the smell rose up, making my stomach growl with hunger. His face was deeply lined but ruddy, the sickness passing him over without so much as the kiss of fever. I slipped my hand into his, and though he squeezed my fingers with a calloused palm, his face looked as remote and guarded as ever. Since my return I had not seen him shed one tear for my grandmother. But it was not my father I resented. It was my mother I blamed for bringing me back, separating me from my cousin.
I gave her long hateful looks even when she put Iron Bessie to my buttocks until I screamed. Living with the Toothakers had softened me, and so, at first, I bleated like a lamb at slaughter when she hit me. In time I learned to make a jail of my teeth for I would rather have died than cry out to her. The only truce to my feelings came late at night when I stood alone, running my fingers along the carved rim of the spinning wheel, wishing for my grandmother’s gentle touch.
A
S THE DAYS
passed I tried to bring the Toothakers alive to my brothers. I told them the stories I had heard in Uncle’s house about Indian raids and the battles of militiamen, but my recounting lacked the richness and magic of Uncle’s telling. Richard would sit and smirk and Tom pretended to listen, but he often fell asleep after the evening meal. The stories gave Andrew nightmares and he would wake screaming in the night, his arms and legs waving about. Mother made me stop then, saying Uncle could run a forge with the air from his lungs and fill a well with curdling nonsense. In the space of a few months, I had become a stranger to my family, my only companion a demanding Hannah, two months shy of her second birthday, who balked at being held or fed by anyone but me. We had been told to stay within a gunshot’s distance of the house, as the Wabanakis had been sighted in settlements south of Cambridge. The Reverend Dane had come with the news that the smallpox was ravaging whole tribes and the braves had come looking for young colonists, boys and girls, to fill their ranks. Grown colony men were knifed and bludgeoned, as were women past childbearing age. Old grandmothers, infants in arms, and children too weak or young to keep pace with the retreating warriors were cut down and left for the ravens.
In Andover and Billerica in the space of a few days, colonnades of sharpened pikes were built around manned towers to defend against stealthy and silent attacks. One guardsman, so unnerved by the thought of a raid, shot and killed his own son as he gathered firewood not twenty paces from the tower. Father shook his head and said the miracle was that such a blustering farmer had been able to hit the boy at all. Young women carried sharp blades within their bodices and aprons, not to kill a raider, but to open their own veins rather than submit bodily to their abductors. Young children were tied with string to their mothers so they couldn’t wander off, and boys of serviceable age were given over to the practice of deadly combat using only sticks, wooden hoes, and scythes.
The only salvation left for the captured was to be ransomed by barter by the relatives left living. There was no forced rescue ever, for the Wabanakis had been born of the fomenting wilderness and knew every mountain pass, every river, and forest as well as the hairs on their own arms. The few who were brought back after living for a time in those dark, obscure places were wild and strange even to their own families. One young woman, returned to her kin in Billerica, had to be tied to her bed, so often did she try to escape back to her abductors. When no family was left, a redeemed captive could only be indentured to those who paid the ransom.
Mercy Williams had been born in Topsfield and had moved with her family to the so-called Eastward, the wild territory to the far north and east of the colonies. Her parents and all her brothers and sisters had been killed by the Wabanakis and she had been taken captive into Canada. Governor Phips ransomed her along with a dozen others and sent them back to their families or as indentured servants to the homes of strangers. With the exchange of twenty muskets she had become a laborer and would have to work for five years to pay back her rescuers.
Father had wanted a manservant to help on our farm, but we could not afford to pay the indenture for a man, so we settled for an orphan girl nobody else wanted. It would soon be apparent why Mercy Williams’ indenture came on the cheap.
Grandmother had owned a comfortable bit of land in Andover, close to four acres on fertile ground, and we would need help in the spring, rendering the fields ready for planting. Mother had earned a small inheritance, a bag of coins placed into her hands at Grandmother’s deathbed, and with it a chance to buy more seed. We would plant on the first warm days a half acre of hay and an acre each of corn and wheat. With a sturdy plow and an ox, two grown men could plow an acre in one day but the land of Essex County was peppered with stones as plentiful as the mussels at Casco Bay. The rocks could defeat the sturdiest plow, and furrowing could be done only after more trees had been cleared with a felling axe, the brush cleared with a billhook and fire. Then the heaviest stones, half buried, could be pulled from the dirt.
The first week of May, Mercy arrived at our house, following Father as he bent his tall frame to clear the door. She stood with her arms crossed, giving us as much of a once-over as we gave her. Mother took one look at her and ordered her outside to wash and sent me along to check her head for nits. I filled a pot with stream water while she sat on the ground like a man, watching me, her knees bent and spread far apart. She fanned herself with her apron and I was shocked to see she was not wearing a shift beneath her skirt.
Her legs were as brown as her arms, and when she caught me staring, she pulled her skirt higher over her thighs. Father had spoken of her as still being a girl, but she had corded muscles like a boy and a gaze that raised the hackles on the back of my neck. Like Lazarus come back from the dead, she had seen what I had only imagined through the stories of Uncle. She had survived the long march to Canada as well as her own memories of the journey. My curiosity at that moment was greater than my decorum over her shame, and I asked her, “How old are you, then?”
She looked at me and smiled a crooked smile, as though one side of her mouth was palsied, saying, “Seventeen or so.” She turned her head and spat through her teeth, mouthing words that did not sound to be English. I handed her the washing pot and a lump of harsh lye soap, which she sniffed and put aside. She rolled up her sleeves and roughly scrubbed at her arms and face, using only the water. The skin on her face was pitted with pox scars, and, despite the washing, she had a smell about her of something sour, like milk gone bad or calfskin poorly tanned. The hair on her scalp was sparse and there was not much to comb through for the lousing. I thought she had been scalped, but when I later asked Richard about it, he told me that had that been so, she would have been missing the top part of her skull as well.
As I teased out the tangled hair, looking for crawling things, I asked, “How long were you with the Indians?”
“ ’Bout three years’ time, mebbe more,” she answered, scratching the back of her neck. The comb caught and pulled at a knot and her fingers wrapped round my wrist as quick as a corn snake. She took the comb from me and set it aside. She then reached out and fingered a bit of my own hair that had spilled from my cap. I felt pity for her at that moment and smiled to show my compassion. She smiled back at me in a one-sided grimace and said, “But now I am home, aren’t I?” I followed her back to the house and she whistled some bit of song. I remembered Mother once saying a whistling woman and a cackling hen come to no good end, but I was lonely and looked for friendship wherever it was offered.
That evening at supper we watched with fascination the way she funneled food into her mouth. She ate with her hands without spilling one crumb and guarded her plate as though it would be taken away at any moment. When we cleared the table, she dropped a plate and broke it. Mother gave her the eye that we had all come to fear, but Mercy picked up the pieces without seeming to notice. Afterwards we were sent to bed. Father had built a separating wall in the common room so that Mercy and I could have our own little room. Richard, Andrew, and Tom slept in the garret above, and Hannah slept on a low cot beside Mercy and me. Father had also built a new rope bed for himself and Mother with a longer frame, as Grandmother’s bed was painfully short for his legs, and had given us the old bed. The first night we lay together, Mercy, without asking, grabbed Margaret’s poppet out of my hands and looked at it as though it were a piece of sweet bun. She roughly turned the doll this way and that, holding it with fingers chewed down to the quick.
I asked, “What was it like to be captured? Was it horrible?”