The Holder of the World (3 page)

This is the night Hannah has willed herself not to remember. What happened survives only as Rebecca’s neighbors’ gossip, embellished with the speculations of scholars. The lover, now painted and feathered as befits a warrior, comes to woo her one last time. And Rebecca surprises him. Reading Hannah’s eyes, she stands and slowly turns, facing the window without surprise or terror. She stands on a reed rug by the window, the very window where Hannah remembers her having led women and children through psalms, and peels her white, radiant body out of the Puritan widow’s somber bodice and skirt as a viper sheds skin before wriggling into the brush. Her body is thick, strong, the flesh streaked and bruised, trussed with undergarments.

The Nipmuc enters the cabin, suddenly immense in his full battle regalia. He cradles the whimpering Easton hound under one arm.

Rebecca scoops Hannah out of her bed, clasps her and weeps as though the child were dead. The Nipmuc jerks his arm, the hound lurches, and a spume of blood leaps from his arms across the table. He swabs Rebecca’s old garments in the blood, smears them with his feet over the floor, stabs holes in the cloth as they darken with blood, then hands her something new and Indian and clean to wear.

Outside, a Nipmuc woman who had taught her to sew deerskin into breeches, takes the child. Hannah watches the cabin grow small, and a fireball erupt from the spilled fish-oil lamp, as Rebecca and the Nipmuc take off for the river, and the woman, running hard and low to the ground, cuts into the woods, along the path to the Fitch farm half a mile away. She does not cry, and the vow she makes, bobbing in the arms of the nameless woman she has known all her life, to remain silent about this night, to sustain her mother in the ultimate lie, the ultimate unnatural crime of Puritan life, she will keep for sixty years.

Hannah’s subsequent years can be read as a sermon on any topic, as proof of any interpretation. But she wills the memory of this night away; she will orphan herself to that memory, deny its existence, for that is the way her mother has planned it. She alone knows the nature of her mother’s disappearance; she must carry the denial of this memory—a lump tenfold heavier than the memory itself—the rest of her life, chastising the lump inside her that is Rebecca with self-doubt and self-hate. Had she been perceived the daughter of a fornicator, not the offspring of an upright widow, no family would have taken her in. It is necessary not only to retain the memory of her beloved, absent mother, but to deny its final blinding, lustful image. To preserve above all the orphan’s tragic tale above the wicked woman’s demonic possession.

Has any child been so burdened? She has witnessed the Fall, not Adam’s Fall, Rebecca’s Fall. Her mother’s Fall, infinitely more sinful than the Fall of a man. She is the witness not merely of the occasion of sin, but of the birth of sin itself.

And I who have studied Hannah’s life nearly as closely as I have studied my own would say that Hannah Easton, whatever the name she carried in Massachusetts, in England, in India or even into history to this very day, loved her mother more profoundly than any daughter has ever loved a mother.

I feel for Hannah as the Nipmuc woman carries her off and drops her noiselessly on a pioneer family’s doorstep, deflecting forever the natural course and location of her girlhood. And I envy Rebecca as she, impulsively, carelessly, leaps behind her lover, who is already on his horse, and vanishes into the wilderness. She has escaped her prison, against prevailing odds that would have branded her. Her lover might have come to the window that night to kill them both. Instead, he became the first man to read the scene between them as something sacred; in the fish-oil glow, to hear the music.

4

LIKE REBECCA
, I have a lover. One who would seem alien to my family. A lover scornful of our habits of self-effacement and reasonableness, of our naive or desperate clinging to an imagined continuity. Venn was born in India and came over as a baby. His family are all successful; there was never question of anything different. He grew up in a world so secure I can’t imagine it, where for us security is another kind of trap, something to be discarded as dramatically as Rebecca stepped put of dog-blooded widow’s weeds into a life of sin and servitude.

Long ago, there was Andrew, self-described untouchable from a Boston Brahmin family who’d leased a summer home next to ours on Martha’s Vineyard. He took me behind the sea-grape arbor, or perhaps I led him there from curiosity and boredom (he was my first), and later that day dolphins threw themselves on the beach and a crowd gathered to watch their threshing and not ours. I remember thinking, stretched nude on a dune above a squad of lifeguards and helicopter cameramen, I hope dolphins won’t always be sacrificed to a fifteen-year-old’s virginity.

Then came Blake, whose refrain to professors in my freshman year was always: “Can someone tell me why I should be learning stuff that’s already in a book?” It was a revelation to me that mutants had been born in my decade and raised in my country with such a pure belief in the perfectibility of knowledge retrieval. Instead of memorizing the stuff, we should be inputting it. We paid huge sums to world-famous experts who sat in their offices and read all day—and in a lifetime they probably covered 5 percent of the written record in their field. The goal of every freshman should be to replicate the data base of the most learned professors in the world. Then they could start using it in their sophomore year.

Chase, a brief flirtation from a summer archaeology dig in Harvard Yard, with a knack for finding fragments: pottery, spectacle cases, clay pipes, bent spoons, Spanish coins. The secret, he said, was an ability
not
to separate the valuable artifacts from the centuries of landfill—anyone could do that, he said—but to merge them, to see continuities between sand and gravel and copper coins or fired-clay powder. He’s the first of my friends to win a genius grant.

Devon, who got me through the first lonely months in London by taking me everywhere by bus and tube and walking, pointing out buildings, revealing how sheer love of a city, sheer awareness of one’s setting, was an adequate replacement for food and warmth, until the day he disappeared and the police found sticks of dynamite and blasting caps in my closet, wrapped in my sweaters. His love of London was a targeting mission.

Gavin and Giles, who seem to be as interchangeable as their names: each had a mum, and a red-faced da in a tight buttoned sweater, both aspired to emigration, New Zealand or the Yukon. They were pure air-and-water fetishists—they
monitored
things—rainfall and temperatures, pollution and pulse rates—and I dallied with them both on the same days, for I had become insatiable not for sex but for presences that were not immediately dismissible or transparently ridiculous. Their temperaments were sweet, what the French call
douce
, meaning mild, even gentle, as well as sweet. I thought of them as dolphins and wanted to protect them like endangered species. I had begun to despair that I’d taken a sip of some secret potion that would leave me forever scornful and impatient, which led, upon my return to Yale for my senior year, to a serious contemplation and the fear on the part of my parents that I might not marry soon, or at all.

I had slipped off the continental shelf of shallow, undergraduate affairs into the dark, cold, maritime trenches.

Love’s old sweet story, fate supplies a mate, the melody lingers on, et cetera, et cetera, for then came the older men, the professors and the bosses and men with complicated lives and fatal flaws, addictions, recoveries, encumbrances, married men, older men, brilliant but unstable men, attractive but self-engrossed. My twenties passed in grad school and in travel and in short-term grants and short-term affairs that took me wherever I wanted to go. Past success became my credentials, and I picked up other men—Other men—meaning the natives of other countries whose immediate attractiveness I could judge, but nothing else about them; the codes were different. I forgave selfishness, petulance, unfaithfulness I would have despised in Americans; I fell for charm and sophistication and tolerated laziness that would have seemed insincere or egregious in the men I grew up with. My college friends and other colleagues had, by then, gone through much the same types and numbers and their first marriages; at least, I told myself, I didn’t have a child. Then at thirty I asked myself why I didn’t have a child. But by then, pills offered no protection, we were in the sargasso of disease. And so one night with my AIDS-free certificate in my handbag, I went to a lecture at Harvard Business School on assets recovery, and to a bar afterward, where I met Venn.

The man I was looking for by then would go to evening lectures in fields far outside his own. He would not be American. I’d always pictured him Chinese or perhaps Latin American, a scientist, one of those poetry-writing physicists or musical chemists who went to foreign films for recreation. I just didn’t think he’d be from India, and three inches shorter than I.

I asked him what he did. “A kind of data processor,” he said. “And you?”

Very few men in my recent past had deflected questions back to me. After ten years of bobbing in the tangle and clutter of semiserious relationships, the most attractive trait I could imagine in a man was a modest interest in other people, notably me, and a perceptible lack of self-involvement.

“What’s a data processor doing at MIT?” I asked.

“I’m more an inputter than a processor,” he said.

“Still—” I pursued.

“It’s a special kind of data and a special kind of input.”

“Try me.”

“Four dimensional, digital.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“Tell me about asset retrieval,” he said. “That’s a little like what I do. That’s why I went to the lecture.”

I thought that night I had found the world’s most modest man. He would not talk about his research; he belittled its potential, even as my own jaw dropped. He could stimulate sense responses—smell, touch, sound—in any subject properly equipped and programmed. But that didn’t excite him. People will always respond to stimuli, but so will pond scum; the interesting problem was constructing an interactive model of historical or imaginative reality. Historical reality to begin with, since there was a data trail, indisputable facts to program in.

Not time-travel, he said. Time-retrieval, to put it in my terms.

5

ON SATURDAY
, Hannah was moved again.

Nothing mattered. Not the slow, clumsy tenderness of the arthritic couple, Robert and Susannah Fitch, whose lives she had burst into Friday night. Not the screaming and cursing of their grown son, Thomas, who had ridden out with a parley party very early in the morning of that same Friday and whom Captain Ephraim Curtis rescued from a Nipmuc ambush in a defile and brought back, grievously bleeding. Thomas Fitch would never walk again.

The people of Brookfield couldn’t believe the betrayal. The Nipmuc were good children of God, loyal to the King. They feared Wampanoag just like everyone else. The families of Brookfield, or Quabaug, as they preferred to call it, all had friends among the Nipmuc, their wandering animals were often returned by Indians, and no white man, encountering an Indian in his fields, or by the river, ever raised his rifle or felt afraid. This whole dispute was unimaginable.

“French,” said some.

Hannah kept her feelings—what must it have been but the world’s harvest of sorrow and confusion, to be later winnowed into rancor and gratitude?—to herself. Shock disguised itself as serenity. She had not spoken, but she was, briefly, the center of everyone’s concern. The little innocent, torn by a savage from her mother’s cold breast, cruelly dumped by a guilty heathen, doubtless thinking it would gain him some credit in the afterlife, on a neighbor’s doorstep.

“Only, we’re not papists,” cried Henry Young. “God has taken his measure. He who would slay the mother and spare the child is crueler than any brute animal.”

When flaming arrows came through the roof of the house, she helped carry out canisters of precious salt, sugar and oil, and prayed with her new parents for divine Providence, then hurried with them behind Thomas’s litter to a large, garrisoned house on the hill.

The two long days and longer nights of Brookfield’s siege she bore as though the heat of eighty bodies huddled too close, the stench of their fear, the war whoops and burning roofs and musket fire were ordinary excesses of summer weather. Henry Young, rallying the defenders, paid with his life for drawing too close to a window.

Lucas Thorpe, a tall, yellow-haired boy who’d survived the same ambush that nearly killed Thomas Fitch and distinguished himself by his enthusiasm for vengeance, volunteered to run to Marlborough for reinforcements. Everyone feared their vaunted friendship with the Nipmuc would be believed, and the columns of relief would bypass Brookfield unless word of their distress got out. During a respite in the fighting, Lucas slipped out the back of the house. She watched, almost praying for the same sudden fate that had befallen Henry Young, as the boy grew small in the brush. And then, before he reached the woods, a dozen tall Nipmuc braves stood, and the colonists watched the boy turning and twisting, shouting but sending no message as the clubs fell upon his head and shoulders. He collapsed, and one brave dipped down with him, out of sight. When he next stood, he held the yellow patch in his hand, and now they could all hear the shouts, even over Goodwife Thorpe’s screaming, and then the braves decapitated the corpse and passed the head among them, throwing it as a sport more than a trophy.

The only man truly to serve as her father was somewhere out there in the dark, pumping arrows into the garrison, or perhaps kicking a boy’s head in an open field in full view of the house. She knew that her mother might be with him or might be inside one of the tents the colonists had boasted of going out to give a taste of eternal hellfire, the moment their liberators came.

The secret dynamic of Puritanism had at last taken flesh.
Now we know
, just when we had begun to doubt it and to sink to their level of easy virtue and soft surrender to effortless productivity, and to believe—blasphemy of blasphemies—that their life had something to teach us, some tenet of inborn nobility: they really
are
devils, the woods really
are
evil,
it’s true, it’s true
, God
is
testing us, demanding the sacrifice of our women and children, the slaughter of our livestock, the taking and defilement of possessions, our honor, our scalps! Gloried be His name! The biblically learned among them preached, “This place is Ziklag! Deliver us from Amalekites!” And King Philip might well have responded, “Taste my steel, Ananias!” Women sweated through childbirth. Children played war games under sturdy tables and rickety chairs. Goodwives and their modest daughters bled and bandaged the mangled bodies of amateur soldiers.

Ephraim Curtis, the practiced woodsman, crawled and ran thirty hellish miles—the first American Olympian—to get troops and supplies from Marlborough. This was life without God’s protection, the life Brookfield had begun to take for granted. Nipmuc constructed a rolling fire spreader, a travois of barrels and shafts and wheels, and rolled the huge, blazing weapon right up to the house. Suddenly, histories tell us, a freak rainstorm rose up and put out the fires. God tests us a bit at times, but He listens; His children, seeing in the rain providential purpose, prayed for strength to survive His blank indifference. Major Simon Willard, riding at the head of his force of healthy troopers, arrived in partial fulfillment of colonists’ prayers. The Major and his men checked the encampment’s badly burned fortifications, salvaged what could be reused from vandalized houses and barns, then advised abandonment and relocation.

A continent of opportunity is a continent of cruelty. They had known that when they came; they hardened themselves to the message so long as they stayed in sight of Boston Harbor and the waters that separated them from the shame-fulness of English history—but they’d forgotten. Now God had rededicated them, praise His name. Devastation exfoliates providential efficacy. Suffering is good, though sometimes confusing. Brookfielders—no more this Quabaug nonsense—scattered to sturdier Puritan garrisons.

Robert and Susannah Fitch settled in a modest, two-storied house on Herbert Street in Salem, bringing with them Hannah, the somber orphan, the living reproach to any forgiveness, any mission to the savages, and Thomas, their newly crippled, aborigiphobic son.