At the end of that year, smallpox danced its way from old England to the new, claiming many for its own. We were spared, but in December, Queen Mary, sovereign of England and all her colonies, died of it.
In 1695, in the early part of August, Margaret was taken away by the Indians. A small party of Wabanaki on horseback had approached the settlement in long coats and hats and so were mistaken for neighboring townspeople. Aunt was hacked down and killed, as were ten or twelve others living in that part of Billerica. They laid a headstone for my cousin next to her mother’s because it was believed that even though her body was not found, her soul must have taken flight at the moment of capture. I was told it was a pleasant place where the headstones were set, although I would never travel there to see it. For many years after, I had dreams of Margaret, and in every one of them she was alive.
By 1701, Father, at the age of seventy-five, began to travel for great stretches of time to Colchester in Connecticut. Sometimes leaving with Richard, and sometimes with Tom, he carved out a great homestead for his children and grandchildren. In time following, Tom and even Andrew would marry, and altogether my three brothers would have twenty-nine children. Tom had five girls before his first son was born and he named one of his daughters after me. His fourth daughter he named Martha. He was the only one of us to name a child so. I think none of us could bear the thought of losing her again if the child did not survive.
When I was twenty-three, I went with Father and my brothers and their wives to Connecticut, carrying with me Mother’s red book. I had dug it up from the ground early one evening a few years before, unwrapping the soiled layers of oilskin to find the book, for the most, dry and whole. I quickly opened its pages and saw my mother’s writing, slender-veined and feathered, but shut it fast again, unable and unwilling yet to read the words inside.
We built two houses in Colchester, and soon after, I met and married my husband. I was made Sarah Carrier Chapman in September of 1707 and within a few months I made ready to read the book. I believed that I had come to the place of womanhood that could bear the weight of her words. But as I held it in my lap, I felt a cautioning dread building inside of me and I sat with it closed in my hands for hours. I feared some passage within would change the felicity that I had knit together with my father or somehow change the memory I held of my mother. And as I was with child, I harkened to the midwife’s warning that too much fearful discovery would mar the unborn. I hid it in Father’s old oaken chest in the cellar, and though it was never far from my thoughts, there was always another birth or death or laying-out that kept the book hidden.
In 1711 the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed an act to reverse the attainders of the wrongly accused. In recompense for Mother’s death, Father would receive from the court a little over seven pounds English money, the amount for her food and shackles. He was only ever granted what he had spent in her care. The reverse of attainder meant that Mother’s sentence of guilt had been made null and void. Nine of the condemned women were not recompensed by the Crown. The best of their valuable houses and land had been seized, never to be returned. In the spring of 1712 we returned to collect our recompense and to carry back with us in two wagons what was left in the Andover house and barn. For the last time we visited Mother’s grave on the great meadow, the stones overgrown to a grassy point, and planted rosemary for the fragrance it would bring in the summer and the remembrance it would bring in the winter.
Father died at age one hundred and nine in the tender middle part of May 1735. Still living at his passing were five children, thirty-nine grandchildren, and thirty-eight great-grandchildren. He had taken to lapsing more and more into the Welsh tongue, as older men of his time and place of birth were wont to do. His hair had not much grayed and he stood always straight and sure-footed. He often walked the six miles to our nearest neighbor, an ailing widower, with a bag of grain on his back. The day of his death found him restless and searching and he rubbed at the joints in his hands as though they pained him. He did not complain or make petulant faces but said to me softly in Welsh, “Henaint ni thow ay heenan.” Old age comes not on its own.
No, I thought, death follows age like the eager bridegroom the bride. I held his huge knotted hand in both of my own and reflected that my father had done more in the last quarter of his life than many men had done in the first. He closed his eyes and slipped without struggle into his lasting sleep. Two pine coffins had to be opened and refitted to receive his body but his shoulders were so broad that he was laid slanted sideways and he looked, before the coffin was closed over, as though he would rest forever with one ear pressed to the earth.
Soon after, I walked some distance through our wakening fields and sat on the ragged stone fence that marked its far edges. I opened the red book and read my mother’s words and the words my father had given her, and all of my questioning and wondering and the gossiping of others were resolved into time and place and purpose. I laid the book aside, for suddenly the weight of it could not be supported by my hands, and I looked around me, amazed that the world had not changed beneath my feet. The sun had shifted across the sky as I read, turning morning to afternoon, but the trees were still in the trembling green of spring, the air was misted and freshening, the shoots of wheat still up-lifting through the fields. How could it be that all around me had remained the same when behind my eyes I still carried the images of the life of the two I had called Mother and Father? I understood then why my mother had demanded of me to wait before opening the book, to wait until I had been tested and hardened by the passing of ages.
I had in my fifty-odd years experienced cruelty and death, losses of the heart, despair, and redemption from that despair. But these things had little prepared me for the thundering shift of ideas, inscribed with ink faded to the rusted color of blood, which said that a land and its people could be governed without the smothering, grasping hand of a monarch. But that men being what they are will supplant that monarch with another so-called protector of the people, who will suppress and fight and betray his way back into tyranny. I looked through the branches of trees and saw great armies advancing upon each other, son against father, brother against his like, and heard through the cawing of crows the crying of children and women and old men as they were cut down and trammeled underfoot. I saw through the swaying of diaphanous shadows agents of the church plotting savagely against their fellow men at altar, and laymen and women preaching in fiery tongues to growing multitudes in the running, ruinous streets of London. Words like “treason” and “trickery” forced their way in whispered explosions from my mouth like metal bores being fired from a flintlock.
And finally, with the shifting light fingering its way up the garden stones, I witnessed the progression of a king from prison to scaffold to beheading. And beside this king stood a man, masked and hooded, who first with a kind hand gently pulled aside the straying locks of hair at the bent and ready neck that would mar the true progress of the blade, and then with a steady, practiced grip, arc the long shaft of the axe up and back and finally down, bringing the sharp, reflecting mirror of history through the air, cleaving at once and forever, past from future, darkness from illumination, servitude from liberty.
Long into dark I sat on the wall, Mother and Father alive to me then, and felt the blood of them both thrumming through my veins. In full darkness I returned the diary to Father’s great chest and, in the years to follow, layered it over with the stuff of the living. Quilts packed away in summer’s heat, linen outgrown by children, coarse cloth used for sacking and for shrouds. And always it was there, like a step-stone in a swift-moving river.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost, I want to thank my wonderful agent, Julie Barer, who took an unknown writer out of the slush pile and, with her own special magic, helped turn her into a published author. Next, I’d like to thank my editor, Reagan Arthur, who, with patience and gentle direction, worked with me to shape a rough manuscript into a finished novel.
My heartfelt thanks also go to the following people at Little, Brown and Company: Michael Pietsch, Sophie Cotrell, Sabrina Ravipinto, Heather Fain, Heather Rizzo, Mario Pulice, and Oliver Haslegrave, for their energy, enthusiasm, and commitment; and to Pamela Marshall, who worked so hard to give the manuscript its final polish.
Where would I be without the encouragement of my beloved family, who were also my first readers: Audrey, John, and Kevin Hickman; Kim, Katie, and Kelly Morrison; Rhoda, Seymour, and Janice Orlowsky; and Ilene, Kevin, and Alyssa Muething. Love to my girls, Patty, Bette, Elaine, and Rose; and, of course, to my “first” first reader, Mitchell. My love and gratitude to all of the “Friends of the Book,” too numerous to list on this little page (but you know who you are). A big thank-you to Juliet Mofford, of the Andover Historical Society, for pointing me to the historical Carrier sites in Andover, Massachusetts, and to Violet Schwarzmann, for personally taking me to the Carrier family homestead in Marlborough, Connecticut. I’d also like to thank my mentor, Abigail Brenner, for her generosity and sage advice. And finally, thank you, Cary, for always listening.
To the descendants of Thomas and Martha Carrier, may you live long and prosper.
KATHLEEN KENT lives in Dallas with her husband and son. The Heretic’s Daughter is her first novel.
Kathleen Kent, The Heretic's Daughter
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