The Holder of the World (4 page)

6

SALEM FORCED
on the farming Fitches professions suitable to a port town. The wharves were raucous with sailors, settlers, whores and drunks. The world’s races were represented, and a mini-congerie of languages. Spanish and French coins were in circulation; it mattered little which regal head graced the ducat. The finished products of the civilized world were being unloaded in Salem, while holds were stuffed with barbarian ballast, lumber and hides and salted foodstuffs for the journey home. Easy livings could be made for the tough and the imaginative. A successful merchant or barrister or doctor had to live the role, had to command respect of common men and foreigners, or else he invited gossip, envy and challenges to his authority. In any event, it was still a fragile outpost rooted in free will and high sentence; no wonder its self-proclaimed virtues decayed to conspiracy and gossip among the backward elements.

As the rich got richer they grew cosmopolitan, at least by colonial standards, and slightly ashamed of their Nonconformist, fanatical origins. It was no longer possible for the virtuous to look about them at their fellow Bay Colony citizens and recognize, let alone assert, as their fathers and grandfathers had, their commonality. The wealthy sought instead to perpetuate their good fortune through their sons’ education at Harvard and their daughters’ distinguished marriages. London styles in dress and barbering led the Bay Colony by no more than three sailings: description, orders, delivery with local tailors to confection milady’s silks, velvet for milord, wigs and lace for both.

But for the dispossessed from the country, for the veterans of Indian raids, demented survivors of scalpings, and for the families who’d never climbed even the first plateau of New World riches that had been promised them, the townsfolk’s backsliding to worldliness and ostentation seemed little better than Catholicism of the English or Roman variety. Purity was no longer valued as the end of human effort, or the goal of social structure. The familiar stocks and pillory and lash post no longer aroused the same dread and inner accounting. As offenses to common morality grew less punishable, the gibbet took on greater natural force. According to Thomas Fitch, the true and faithful, though still numerically preponderant, were losing control by the month of the Holy Covenant that had bound their colony in the New World to Almighty God. Losing
by the day
to the carriage owners, the stone-fronted-house builders, the rising aristocracy who doubted a young man’s loss of both legs to King Philip was the result of a blood encounter with the archfiend Prince of Darkness.

Fitch, out one day on an errand, had watched an old man ridiculed for wearing a wide-brimmed bonnet on a humid summer’s day, and young Latin School buffoons tossing stones at it, until he turned, doffed his hat, and revealed the hairless, fleshless bony carapace of a fellow survivor of King Philip’s raids, a man who had survived the partial ripping of his crowning glory, and the Latinist cowards had fled his addled curses. The sight of some grimy, disreputable fellow with one of several possible letters of the sinner’s alphabet—Adulterer, Blasphemer, Thief, Incest breeder—branded to his forehead, or an Indian patch sewn to a woman’s sleeve for miscegenation, no longer excited the intended pity or fear; evidence of outrageous sin sometimes earned the wretch a farthing and a snicker. From his chair behind the upper window, Thomas would watch the boats unloading, calling out to his father the multiple offenses of unregulated greed, the blocks of marble for stone facades, the fine-grained imported hardwoods for palatial fireplaces—imagine, importing wood to the colonies!—the bales of Scottish wool.

Their world was ripping apart, thieves and cutthroats walking the street in open defiance of common decency; crafty, devious merchants without a ha’penny of godfear piling up ducats and doubloons and pleading too great a poverty to contribute to the Sunday offering.

ROBERT AND THOMAS
took up cabinetmaking; Susannah and Hannah, sewing.

Hannah discovered in herself an obsessive love of needlework, which was, she suspected, an overflow of a nascent fascination with—or failing for—finer things. A stray sunbeam on her workbasket, kindling the weakest combustion of colors among twisted skeins of colored thread, could raise indecent palpitations in her heart. Temptation dogged the sensuous Hannah everywhere: in rich clients’ halls as she delivered her handiwork of velvet gowns and quilted underskirts, coats flirty with ladders of bowknots and lingerie undersleeves, and caps of sheerest white muslin; at the baker’s as she passed by shelves of German fried and sugared breads; at the wharf, as sweaty laborers wheeled and rolled cargoes smelling of figs and raisins and spices she couldn’t name and hadn’t yet tasted.

Her embroidery gave away the conflict she tried so hard to deny or suppress. She knew she must deny all she’d seen the night of her mother’s disappearance and all she felt, for she, worthless sinner and daughter of Satan’s lover, had been taken in and raised by decent souls. Instead, her needle spoke; it celebrated the trees, flowers, birds, fish of her infant days. Nostalgia, all the more forceful because it was unacknowledged, was augmented with fancy. Flora and fauna grew wild on fecund and voluptuous terrain.

Even at twelve, Hannah Easton’s work was known, and families that would not have admitted her stepparents to their parlors insisted on showing her inside, offering her cakes and tiny tokens of additional payment. She would accept no extra money or sweets. She wanted only additional threads, sheer spools of color that the wealthy hoarded and were happy to share.

Susannah praised her needlework skill, but feared the wantonness of spirit it betrayed. She had the girl work exclusively on bonnets and farthingales. Hannah sewed assiduously in dim light from whale oil. Too assiduously, Susannah feared. Even diligence should not be indulged, lest it lead to pride of excess.

“The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,” she admonished.

“Ecclesiastes, nine-eleven,” said Hannah, not looking up.

She tried to correct the deformation of love. She brought
The Bay Psalm Book
to Thomas where he sat by the window in a mobile chair he had ingeniously constructed and had him locate a verse her needle could commemorate. Thomas could read and write as Susannah could not, and it was to Thomas that Hannah’s education was wholly entrusted.

Thomas chose the most popular:

Aske thou of me, and I will give the Heathen for thy lot;
and of the earth thou shalt possess the utmost coasts abroad
.

He whomped
The Bay Psalm Book
shut so hard that a tong fell off its hook by the fireplace. Was Thomas, too, troubled by the ambiguities of providential messages? Did he, legless woodworker, feel bitter that “utmost coasts” were no longer possible for him to possess?

An uneasy memory stalled Hannah’s hand as she reached for threads from the workbasket. Another window. Another psalm-sayer. Rebecca sang with sweet confidence.

Hannah sang from the compulsion of memory.

Desire of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance; and the utmost parts of the earth for thy possession
.

Rebecca had sung from Psalms 2:8; Thomas recited from
The Bay Psalm Book
of 1640.
Aske thou of me. Desire of me
. Ask or desire—what’s the difference, anyway? Except. Except that “ask” suggests aggression and self-righteousness. It seems like a clash of the sexes, a triumph of pioneer virility.

 … heathen for thine inheritance. Heathen for thy lot
.

Did Philip’s Wampanoag warriors and Rebecca’s Nipmuc lover suffer as they went from being “inheritance” to “lot” in Puritan vocabulary?

The verse emblazoned itself in colors so tropical that the threads Hannah used had to have been brought over from a mysterious place with a musical name: Bandar Abbas, Batavia, Bimlipatam. The result is, for me, one of the great colonial samplers (though she was not sewing it to prove her marriageability), far smaller than the usual quilt, not much larger than a bandanna.

On a field of light blue, Hannah created an “uttermost shore.” A twelve-year-old Puritan orphan who had never been out of Massachusetts imagined an ocean, palm trees, thatched cottages, and black-skinned men casting nets and colorfully garbed bare-breasted women mending them; native barks and, on the horizon, high-masted schooners. Colonial gentlemen in breeches and ruffled lace, buckled hats and long black coats pacing the shore. In the distance, through bright-green foliage, a ghostly white building—it could even be the Taj Mahal—is rising.

“The Utmost Parts” (Anonymous, Salem c. 1680) sold to an anonymous buyer on the open market at Sotheby’s (Tokyo), in 1983 for $6,000
. Besides me, only one person in the world knows the names of both Anonymouses.

That little embroidery is the embodiment of desire. The full verse from Psalms is scrolled beneath the vision—for surely that is what it is: a pure vision. It is the first native American response to a world that could be African or Indian or anything not American. It employs the same economy, the same apparently naive sophistication as the Mughal paintings that would later feature her.

Thomas framed her handiwork in the finest cherrywood left over from a chest he had made for the fearsome old magistrate, the twisted John Hathorne (whose excesses in the witch trials would so torment his descendant, Nathaniel Hawthorne). He heaved himself as high as he could in his mobile chair and hammered the heavy object low into the wall behind her bed. The rainbow banner glowed, a genie’s lamp, in a cold, narrow room. And at bedtimes when she knelt by it to pray, it shot the familiar virtues she prayed for—humility, gratitude, meekness—with a pagan iridescence.

I HAVE SEEN
this handiwork and been bemused by its extravagance and ambiguity. It survives in the private collection of a Hollywood mogul, son of a Dachau survivor, the producer-director of five slug-and-chase movies, the kind that brings out popcorn munchers by the million to mall Cineplexes. In 1983 he flew me out to Bel Air for a proposition. He’d heard I knew Puritan art, that I was an asset hunter, and that I’d heard of the Emperor’s Tear. He wanted me to work for him as his private art adviser. He has taste, and his taste is for colonial American.

Hannah’s personal message has now become commodified; it is collectible art. Its current owner hangs it in a halogen-lit hallway in his Bel Air garrison. The high-tech hanging and lighting diminishes, I imagine, the original shock of the Salem Bibi’s subtext. In Bel Air, the uttermost shore is a phone call away. All the same, in that overfurnished, overdecorated, oversurveillanced warehouse of museum-quality purchases, the Salem Bibi’s covenant seems as ambiguous and as appropriate as ever. Bugs Kilken of Bel Air knows that his father—and, therefore, he—was spared. He believes in what Hannah would call grace; what he calls the luck of the draw.

For Bugs, who makes millions with schlock and for whom moviemaking is a kind of technological indulgence increasingly distant from art, true expression is found only in naive visions. He feels he should be simplifying his life. He’s a vegetarian and doesn’t drink; he admires the Shakers. He feels the world went wrong around 1700, and his art collection sets out to restore a little sanity.

Bugs’s father survived Dachau because he could repair light bulbs. Simple as that; he’d been a poor boy in Poland who knew how to reconnect the filaments of blown light bulbs without breaking the glass or detaching the bottoms. The guards kept him alive. In their low cunning, they billed the authorities for new bulbs and kept the change. Kilken, Senior, came to L.A. after the war and started a lighting store. He remarried, and Bugs, and Bugs’s studio, are the results. Bugs wants to make a movie about his father, about the petty and the grotesque maneuverings that killed millions and spared dozens, but he can’t—he’s locked into the industry. He can’t downsize; he can’t desert his fans and distributors. That day, he’d drunk Calistoga water and stared at Hannah’s embroidery.

“It’s a pretty little piece, isn’t it?”

I said nothing.

“British. But from India. Bought it in an old estate sale in London,” he told me. I couldn’t tell if he was testing me or bragging. I knew that he’d bought it in Tokyo for six thousand dollars. I’ve since learned that’s how he operates: buys cheap, donates it to a museum, repurchases to establish a public value.

“They embroidered like this in the American colonies,” I ventured. “Never so beautifully, of course.” Still testing me, he’d agreed. It could be American.

“Salem, perhaps,” he’d said. “Could that be the Taj Mahal?”

“There’s no record that anyone in America knew about the Taj Mahal,” I’d said.

“I think it is the Taj. Whoever embroidered that was a very sophisticated person. There’s so much we don’t know about colonial America. A port city like Salem, or Boston—they were nerve centers of their time. Anything known in London would be known in Boston six weeks later.”

But now I know: Hannah took that embroidery with her to England and then to India when she married. It
is
her sampler, and it probably stayed in Asia, perhaps in some maharaja’s private collection, until Bugs Kilken redeemed it. That day, I’d pushed a little harder. “There was a piece like this that came up in a Sotheby’s sale in Tokyo this year.”

He smiled, a kind of guarded conspiracy. “Really? Not a crude copy, I hope.”

And now, ten years later, Hannah has brought us together again. He’s learned about Hannah. He knows I know about Hannah. He’s discovered the Salem Bibi. He knows the fingers that did the embroidery have also touched the Emperor’s Tear.

7

OVER THE YEARS
Susannah Fitch passed on to Hannah all the conventional wisdom and housekeeping tips she herself had needed to make for Robert an agreeable bride and efficient helpmeet, and the one new skill—the sewing and healing of scalped heads—that she had taught herself since that frightful siege of Brookfield.

This was different from nursing. All frontier wives and mothers know that knowledge of nursing is more valuable than cooking and cleaning. There are always fights or accidents with axes, drownings in streams with slippery banks, fevers that maim the mind as well as limbs. One child in five might grow up. But when King Philip’s War heaped Indian rage quite literally on colonists’ heads, Susannah had the opportunity to improve upon the scalp-healing technique of the very aged Goodwife Brooks of Woburn.

Susannah adapted a technique she’d learned from a horse doctor. When hunting and guard dogs got into fights with raccoons, bears and wolverines, those that survived often required emergency surgery. And when the wounds were too deep, or too broad, the doctor often snipped off pieces of skin from smaller cuts and sewed them as bridges across the injury. He considered regenerative processes limited to the lower animals, the way lizards and frogs grew back their lost limbs. But Susannah experimented with the men of Brookfield and found, more often than not, the bridge became permanent; the bone was covered; the horrible puckering was reduced. She found that perfectly good strips of skin could be cut from the back of an unconscious man and sewn in bands across the scalp. If he survived the scalping, he’d certainly live through the harvesting from his back and ribs.

And Hannah, though squeamish at the sight of blood drawn righteously through public whippings outside the meeting hall, took enthusiastically to assisting in Susannah’s sealings-up. Nursing, she still abhorred. Washing and bandaging wounds, cleaning up pus and vomit, all this she found too passive, too mundane. In rare moods, she remembered how much fun Rebecca had made their trips into the forest in order to pick herbs, scrape barks, squeeze or boil medicinal secretions of insects. But in the Fitch house, Rebecca’s remedies would have been condemned as shameful witchery owing far too much to nighttime aboriginal conjurings (how would any decent white woman learn such things, test them, and trust them? And as always, Hannah had her terrible secret to bear).

Surgery, however, was respectable, especially when each success and each failure were ascribed to the glory or mysterious purposiveness of God. Hannah, cursed or blessed with too much intensity, improvised daring techniques on stray cats and slow squirrels, so that by the time she was fourteen she covertly but regularly practiced on small animals, first skinning their heads with speed and care as she had seen the Nipmuc women do, then stitching the flaps of skin to the raw, shiny flesh.

Her apprenticeship is chronicled obliquely. A 1685 diary entry of Providence Silsbee refers to a large and surprising plague of bald rodents in Salem. (Memories of this peculiar plague would figure later in witchcraft trials.) Silsbee had ascribed the damage to high-spirited boys, but he did remark on the brightly colored threads used to stitch the skin, the whimsical patterns that made squirrels at a distance look like recipients of gaily colored skullcaps.

Later she would make her way to a smaller subcontinent with a vaster wilderness and meet a fugitive Venetian surgeon or quack fleeing an emperor in a Capuchin’s robes and learn from him one hundred and one ways to fix dented skulls and damaged souls. That Venetian, lacking a Puritan’s humility but not a Puritan’s familiarity with Scripture, would boast to her, “
I kill and make alive, I wound and I heal, neither is there any can deliver out of my hand
.”

Hannah herself suffered a mysterious ailment in 1685. The ailment kept her in bed, a doleful insomniac, for six weeks. One moment, she was reciting a poem for company:

A tribe of female hands, but manly hearts
Forsake at home their pastry-crust and tarts
To knead the dirt, the samplers down they hurl
,
Their undulating silks they closely furl
.
The pickaxe one as a commandress holds
,
While t’other at her awkness gently scolds
.
One puffs and sweats …

and the next she was sweating and writhing on the rug by the hearth.

Neighbors stopped by the Fitch house and made uplifting conversation. Others prayed and, remembering her doleful experience in the woods during King Philip’s raid, began probing just below the threshold of consciousness. Of course their inquiries were always considerately phrased in proper Puritan language of bad influences, unchristian proclivities learned early and perhaps never expunged by the charities of Goodwife Fitch and her sober and righteous husband and suffering, unfortunate son.

For the Fitches, who viewed their foster daughter as especially talented and obedient, but of a secretive disposition whose origins could only be traced to the night in the woods when she saw her mother murdered before her eyes (and, worse, mysteriously disposed of so that not a trace remained), there was always the fear that the memory of that night would someday return. They feared for her sanity when they saw Indians on the streets of Salem, or scalped men, but she never revealed the slightest interest in any of the direct perpetrators or victims of that terrible night.

HER CLOSEST FRIEND
was Hester Manning, daughter of the smith, whose house and forge on Herbert Street always gathered a crowd of Salem’s least pious young men. Something about fire and hammers and horses, Hester said, brought out a male’s recalcitrant streak. Or perhaps it was the presence of Hester herself, small and dimpled, with a saucy air that promised more favor than it ever delivered. Hester had lost an aunt when King Philip’s warriors had massacred settlers in Lancaster in the winter of 1676, and she brought Hannah the book that she insisted everybody,
everybody
, was reading, even the fancy dressers on Chestnut Street, for whom Hannah would make breeches and farthingales as soon as she was well again. The book was
The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Commended by her to all that Desire to know the Lord’s Doings to, and Dealings with Her. Especially to Her Dear Children and Relations
.

Hester had entrusted herself to marriage for deliverance. She had the sort of imagination that was all too compliant; she could see herself enacting nearly any situation a book, or an anecdote, even a whimsical suggestion, presented to her. This made her an ideal companion for Hannah, whose own sense of special mission in life was firmly set though rarely articulated. Anyone looking at these two fifteen-year-old maidens in the summer of 1685 would have thought them destined for opposite fates: Hannah to linger in Salem, Hester to reposition the stars.

Hannah must have shuddered or screamed when she heard the name Rowlandson. She must have wondered if this Rowlandson was not a relative of the minister Joseph Rowlandson, who hadn’t succeeded in halting her father’s mad ride to Brookfield and encampments beyond. I imagine her speculations. What if Edward Easton had stayed in Lancaster? Would Rebecca not have run off with her Indian? Would she and Rebecca have been taken prisoner like Mary Rowlandson, sold as slaves, moved from swamp to swamp, forced to beg for food scraps, even learn to savor the vile tastes of horse hooves and parched corn?

There were rumors, never put to rest, that not all white women abducted were enslaved or scalped or mercifully sacrificed to the heathen deities. This was Hester’s special theory; she could fancy herself abducted by heathens. Of course it was the devil himself whispering into the pillow at night, and of course it was sinful even to mention it to one whose own mother—

Hannah raised her hand. She took no offense. In fact, truth be told, the wild improbability of Hester’s fancy rendered its possible truth, even its attractiveness, totally credible. There were sightings, sworn by respectable witnesses, of fair-haired and light-skinned women, English gentlewomen, not barmaids or serving wenches, or the pope’s own whores from the gutters of Paris, moving with bands of Indians on the outer fringes of civilization.

Hannah cringed from the memory of her own dread-filled hour. Over and over, Rebecca, with one saucy leap onto her lover’s white horse, defected from Zion, defected from family love.

Pray, dear Hester, do go on.

Hester caught the flicker and felt encouraged to intone her favorite passage about a modest, decent woman’s obscene afflictions. “
Now is the dreadful hour come …
,” she started.

Did Hannah’s rage target the Providence that had allowed a family to be broken up by death and desertion as well as by her mother? Or had the twin rage begun its process of coalescence, entwined in the dense embroidery of her life?

“
Some in our house were fighting for their lives
,” Hester read on, her thin voice deepening with anticipation of violence,
“others wallowing in their blood, the house on fire over heads, and the bloody heathen ready to knock us on the head if we stirred out …”

Hannah heard again the Nipmuc war cries and Thomas Fitch’s screams. Flames singed the clean walls of the garrison on the hill. Bullets flew into the room, erratic as bats, and nested in infants’ bowels and toddlers’ kneecaps.

“… Thus we were butchered by those merciless heathens, standing amazed, with the blood running down to our heels …”

Guard yourself against aliens, Hester’s voice suggested. Hannah pulled her quilt tight over her head. The godless are invading the garden that the diligent have cleared from the forest primeval.

Hester put down her book. “Tell me what it was
really
like, Hannah. They say when you have these spells … you’re remembering.”

“They?”

“The boys at the forge. You’re a great topic of speculation, Hannah Easton.”

She had always thought of herself as one who watched, who had the privilege of remaining outside family or society, by virtue of her loss and secret. She knew there had already been inquiries of possible marriage and that her foster father had politely intervened.

“Mrs. Rowlandson’s account is such as the common press should wish of savages and gentlewomen alike,” said Hannah. “Five years I dwelled in the forest and knew the forest and all its dwellers as a friend. And for perhaps a week, but especially for two days and nights, I knew it as a tempest. I count no man as my friend, nor as my enemy.”

Then Rebecca stepped out of Hannah’s memory, and spoke. Hannah was an infant again. And again Rebecca was initiating her daughter into a whispered, subversive alphabet. “
A
is for Act, my daughter!”

Hester heard Hannah babble deliriously from inside her quilted cave and fetched Susannah.

“
B
is for Boldness,” Hannah pledged. “
C
is for Character.
D
is for Dissent,
E
is for Ecstasy,
F
is for Forage …”

And
I
, thought Hester, remembering the women who wore it emblazoned on their sleeves, is for Indian lover.

“
I
is for Independence,” said Hannah.

The next morning Hannah came down as though she had been in bed only overnight and not a month and a half of nights. Her recovery was miraculous.

I do not choose the word carelessly. If God can speak through a bee sting, why cannot He speak through the ghost of life-loving Rebecca?