At that moment Mother called for us to come back to the house, and I think Andrew would be standing there even now had I not taken his hand and told him it was time to go in. In the kitchen Mother gave me a bucket and bid me go to Chandler’s Inn for small beer. She tied a few precious coins in a little bag and knotted it tight to my apron. William Chandler would take barter for his room and board but not for his spirits. He had to pay coin to the shipper in Boston and so demanded payment in kind at his door. Most times it was Father who went to the inn for the beer, but he had left before dawn to check his traps at the river, and if we were fortunate, we would have fried beaver tails with pork for our supper.
As I walked the short distance down the main road to the inn, I remembered hearing Richard say to Father that in Boston, there was a new drink from the Caribee sold in the taverns to sailors who made port there. It was called “rum” and was wickedly stronger than beer. Father then told Richard that the surest way to awaken on a ship far out to sea was to drink this rum until you were made senseless, easy pickings for the impress men. I matched my steps to the little marching tempo I sang, “rum, rum, rum, rum . . . rum, rum, rum, rum.”
Within a short while I entered the yard at the inn and saw Phoebe Chandler struggling to lift a full bucket of water just drawn from the well. I stood by for a time, enjoying the wrestling and jerking about of the heavy ropes, hoping she would fall in before she cleared the bucket over the lip of the well. She was resting on the edge of the stones, catching her breath, when she looked up and saw me. It must have seemed that I appeared from out of thin air and she started with fright. With an ugly look she ran to the inn, slamming a side door as she entered. I followed, entering by the front door as if I were queen of the world. Inside all was dark, the smell of roasting meat feathering my nose as well as the fruity ripeness of a tripe gone over, or a fish poorly smoked. Goody Chandler was a thrifty cook and would throw back into the pot any entrails or head soup left on a patron’s plate. In this way she would ensure enough food to feed her visitors from Sabbath to Sabbath.
The common room was like a small cavern, smogged and musty, with a generous fire burning in the hearth. Men sat about the few tables, eating their noonday meal, and seated closest to the hearth was a figure I knew well. His face was in profile, the high domed forehead etched in sharp relief by the glow of the fire. And leaning over him to give drink was Mercy Williams. As she poured beer from a pitcher into Uncle’s cup, one of his fingers brushed lightly over her bodice where her nipple would be. The gesture could have been accidental, the chance collision of flesh against wool. But I saw the crooked smile on Mercy’s face and knew that she had invited it. Phoebe slipped into the room from her mother’s kitchen and looked about with eyes squinted against the murky light. As Mercy straightened to stand, she tucked the pitcher onto her hip and looked directly at me, as though she had known all along I had been standing in the shadows. Goody Chandler came into the room with a rag in her hands, and from the way her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed, I could see that Mercy had been making batches of her own fermenting noisome brew.
Men are always the last to ken what women know by sniffing the air. That’s why God gave bodily might to Adam, to balance the inequities in strength. For if Eve had been given the power to serve her cunning and cruelty, there would have been a terrible reckoning for all mankind, and the archangel would have trod on Adam’s heels to escape paradise unsinged. The three of them stared me down for a time, until one of the men remembered his empty belly and called for more food. Uncle turned to me, his face red from drink and the heat of the fire, and his smile disappeared. He raised a finger and pointed at me, jabbing the air like a sword, and said, “I am watching you. I am watching you all.”
Mercy took a few steps closer and said, “What do you want here?” A corner of her brown dress had worked its way up, showing the tiniest bit of crimson underskirt. As she walked nearer, I saw that the dress had been pinned up with the needle she had stolen from me. The needle pinned back the darker fabric, holding the overskirt aloft as if it had been raised by some little breeze or some misstep as she paced the common room floor. I had seen the likes of such red drapery on Margaret’s poppet. And I knew then what Uncle had done with the cloth he had taken from his wife.
I held up the bucket and said to Goody Chandler, “I have come for small beer.” She took the bucket and the coins and disappeared into the kitchen. Mercy drew her arm around Phoebe’s shoulders and, whispering into her ear, pulled her to the back of the room, ignoring the men’s calls for service. Goody Chandler soon returned with the bucket filled with a rich soapy broth and held the door for me as I left. Most likely to lock it behind my back.
Low, skittering clouds had started a misting rain and I pulled the lid tight over the bucket, pulling the shawl closer about my head. Passing the yard, I saw Phoebe standing at the side door, Mercy hanging about her neck. I turned my back to them and had walked no more than twenty paces when a piece of the sky fell on the back of my head, knocking me to my knees. The bucket dropped without breaking, and lying next to it was a stone the size of my fist. Had it grazed my naked skull, it would have peeled away part of my skin and with it a braid of hair. They stood motionless next to the well, Phoebe still holding a stone in her hand. I reached behind my ear and felt a tender knot rising beneath my hand. The spiced and gummy air, filled with rain and dust, turned to the flooding coppery tincture of blood. I had bitten my lip and drops of red spackled the ground in gentle wavering patterns. My fingers closed around the soaking leaves littering the yard like remnants from a pagan wedding, and I remembered from Uncle’s stories that every pagan ceremony ended in sacrifice. I also remembered my mother’s words, “If not for my brother, then there is naught but home.” Uncle had given me up for a lathered and slatternly whore, and I felt the hope of seeing Margaret again diminishing to a thing as small and hard as the shard of pottery I had found in the garden.
I heard Mercy say, “Go on . . . go on . . . ,” and Phoebe walked closer, squinting and grimacing to better see, expecting the vague crouching form in front of her to cower and cry, as this was what she would have done. What she did not expect was a raging creature in the guise of a child, shawl flying behind it like the wings of some predatory bird, spitting and foaming. Startled, she dropped her only weapon and had but a moment for a squall of protest before I dragged her to the ground and raked my nails across her bland and milky face. I grabbed at her cap, pulling savagely, and parted her from clumps of her hair before Mercy came from behind and boxed my ears. I threw myself then at Mercy, kicking and biting, inflicting as much damage as I could, knowing she would soon throw me to the ground. I kicked both her shins and bit the web of her hand so deeply that she carried the half-moon scar for the rest of her life. What saved my head was the ample bulk of Goody Chandler tearing us apart as though she would cleft sin from salvation.
She screamed as she pushed me away, “You are a Devil to fight so. Look, see what you have done to my daughter!”
Phoebe lay on the ground, her arms flung over her head, squealing like a titmouse caught in the jaws of a black snake. Some of the men had come to the door to witness the thrashing, and among them was Uncle, holding a cup in his hand.
Picking up my bucket, I said to Mercy, who was sucking on the wound in her hand, “I hope it rots until every finger on your thieving hand falls off.”
I turned to go, but the folds of wool wrapped around my neck were not enough to stop the sound of Mercy’s voice, hard and carrying. “You all heard,” she said. “She cursed me. She has a witching way. But why else? She is her mother’s daughter.”
Before I entered the house, I sat in the yard, rubbing my head. The skin on my skull knocked painfully with the rhythm of my heart, and one shoulder felt bruised and tender. The palms of my hands were scraped from falling and I gently brushed at the dirt in the wounds. Perhaps it was true that I was like my mother, as everyone seemed to think so. Perhaps the very desire to set myself ap
art from her proved that I, in fact, had her contrary nature. I was not pretty and quick like Margaret or bland and pliable like Phoebe Chandler. There was a glittering hardness about me like mica and I thought of my fingers wrapped around the rock I had carried against Samuel Preston. Camp dogs will fight and tear at one another for days until a stranger comes too close to the fire, and then they will turn as one and attack the intruder. And the world was full of intruders.
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 17th 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.
CHAPTER FIVE
January 1692–May 1692
ON 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 crash
ing 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?”