Charis in the World of Wonders Read online

  CHARIS IN THE WORLD OF WONDERS

  MARLY YOUMANS

  Charis in the

  World of Wonders

  IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

  The author gratefully acknowledges the American Antiquarian Society

  in Worcester, Massachusetts, for use of the library

  and a sojourn in the Regent Street Fellows Residence.

  Cover art and design by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

  © 2020 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco

  All rights reserved

  ISBN 978-1-62164-304-3 (PB)

  ISBN 978-1-64229-111-7 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Control Number 2019952974

  Printed in the United States of America

  For R. H. W. Dillard and Susan Hankla

  As runs the Glass,

  Man’s life doth pass.

  —The New-England Primer, 1690

  CONTENTS

  1 Sup Sorrow

  2 Wilderings

  3 Haven

  4 The Frampled Household

  5 Sybbrit

  6 Promise

  7 Wedlock

  8 The Groaning-Time

  9 Path in the Dark

  10 The Far-Faring

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Excerpt from Tobit’s Dog

  More from Ignatius Press

  I

  Sup Sorrow

  May 1690, near Falmouth

  I have heard tell that truth loves the light and is most lovely when most naked; and yet I have dreaded sunrising for half my life, and misliked the sounds of birds waking and the look of naked skin when rose and gold were lighting up the quarrels in the window. And in meetinghouses, I have listened as the ministers raged against the wilderness, the lair of Satan, and though I know more of both the beauty of the trees and the burning-flax flare of hell-fire than any of them are likely to know, I do not deny the power of the gloom lodged in groves or the mystery that flashes behind the leaves, eager to devour us, eager to transform us. For this is the world of wonders, an enchanted place of dreams, portents, and prodigies.

  My mother woke me in the dark; I felt the absence of my brothers and father from the room as something empty and cold before I heard the black-powder bang of distant pistols and the blasts of musket-fire. Mother’s hands smelled of smoke, and I knew she must have been loading muskets while John, Joseph, and Isaac fired from the house with my father and Blue Jonas, our indentured man who had come to us only the month before, and the others—my uncles and aunts and older boy cousins, together with Onesimus, my uncle Thomas’ African, who my father said should have been named Philippos or friend-of-horses because he had such a rare gift with them, although I always thought that he was fond of horses because a rider feels so free on horseback. Mary lay curled beside me in the trundle, warm and breathing dampness against my shoulder. A mosquito hummed by my ear, hunting blood. Faint pink flushes washed over the room.

  Mother was murmuring at me, pulling me to my feet and thrusting a gown over my petticoats and shift. She bade me sit and tugged on my woolen stockings and shoes. When I stood, she tied a blanket into a sling around my back. I reeled a little, still waking into the fear and the trembling of that morning. White smoke drifted into the room, smelling of brimstone.

  “Climb down the wych elm,” she said to me, tucking my hair into a coif. The tree was no wych elm, but we liked to call it so because we didn’t know the name, and there had been a wych elm sent from the north of England planted outside my mother’s hall across the sea. Not that she had ever seen the tree, for her father, a younger brother with small inheritance and one of the godly, had sailed to this country in 1630 on the Arbella, before the distemper of civil wars broke out in England. The men had cleared the trees from near the house, all save this one mighty bole.

  “Climb down,” I repeated.

  “And run like herringbone stitch, back and forth to the woods, and so flee to the hiding place. The house is clear on that side now, at least for this moment. We will find you. Stay for us, Charis. We will come.”

  I clung to her arms, but she pushed me away and tugged Mary from under the coverlet and set her feet on the floorboards. She collapsed, still asleep.

  “Can you carry Mary pickpack? I can lash her to you.”

  I nodded, the tears seeping into my eyes and stopping up my voice, as tears can do, though a voice and eyes are so altogether different.

  “Charis, go with my love. Do not tarry. Fare thee well,” she said, binding Mary to my back with a long piece of linen.

  “Mother—”

  “Make haste,” she said, yet held me close, and I cannot ever forget the scent of her with the brimstone and fragrance of rosewater mixed, and how I shivered in her arms.

  She soothed me as if I were a little child like Mary and not a young woman, and kissed me as she led me through the hall and opened the shutters to the window that looked out onto the wych elm. I had clambered down its branches many times, and now I suspect that my parents must have ignored our mischief and let us climb harum-scarum in preparation for a day like this one, with the Indians in chaotic number around the house and the fear in us that we would all be knocked on the head and split open by the tomahawks of savages who loved us not, nor our ways.

  “Hearken,” she said, as I crawled out the window onto the branch that nearly touched the house. “Be resolved, and divine Providence go with you, my sweet Charis.”

  “Mother,” I called, reaching back toward her, shifting on the thick branch that Onesimus had trimmed to make room for the wall.

  When I swung over the sill, everything changed for me. We are meant to go in and out of doors in civilized style, but my mother bade me climb into woodsy wildness and a darkness flushed with crimson light and torches where godly men and women are not meant to go. Though sent, I abandoned my own to whatever martyrdom might come, and to whatever defense or escape might be attempted.

  All would have been different if we had stayed settled in Boston. In the town, my father was well respected. Our dwelling-house was secure among many others, and Sewalls and Mathers and Winthrops were offered fine talk and drams of black cherry brandy or glasses of Canary in our parlor.

  The May air washed over me, cool and tinged with smoke. I almost over-toppled from the weight on my back. Bark tore at my arms; Mary’s fingers dug into my skin.

  My mother’s voice was calling, though softly. What words did she say? Laus Deo? Love?

  Branch by branch I lowered myself awkwardly through the tree, birds waking in their nests and Mary complaining as I scraped her through twigs, and I saying hush, hush, hush all the way. Like an ill-hung pendulum, the weight of her swung me from side to side, and I feared each grasp of a branch would not hold. The ground met the leather of my shoes with a slap. Standing in the gloom under the tree with my palms smarting and Mary shifting on my back, I looked about me. Smoke wafted from the far side of the house. I could glimpse torches in fields where the corn stubs had been plowed into earth. Abruptly a great fountain of birds jetted forth from some remains of last season’s stalks, crying against the flames and the hubble bubble of strange men. Shouts and shots from the front of the house sounded far away, though an arrow wound with burning flax from the barn slew past me and woke me further to our danger.

  All at once I darted away, following my mother’s advice to move like a thread of silk skittering in quick herringbone stitches across a field of linen. I dove into a patch of last year’s corn, still standing, and out again; the rattling noise frightened me worse than the open where surely I was more likely to be pursued. The burden of Mary slung me one way, then another. Ahead, the black, irregular line of trees was quiet and still as if wa
iting.

  From the time I was old enough to spy on gossip in Boston, I knew to keep clear of wilderness. The realm where the bad lord Satan ruled, the forest was savage, boiling with wild men and women who spat leaves from their mouths and somersaulted around a stew pot that danced with the bones and flesh-gobbets of children. In the trees, animals not known to the English lurked, great green or tawny cats who would pounce from a branch. Didn’t the ancients set two bears, mother and son, among the constellations? Ursa Major and Minor seemed to shadow forth some truth because bears burned for us and lumbered forward to give a hug, all scimitar claws and curved teeth. Our Boston weaver, Goodman Turell, claimed that unicorns and basilisks played deep in the forest, though my father laughed and said that basilisks were naught but snakes, and that no cockerel would ever hunch on the egg of a serpent to hatch a basilisk. Why, the basilisk, if it existed, would devour the cockerel when it pipped!

  Now the forest would be either my refuge or my grave. If descried by the Indians, we would be knocked on the head and killed, or perhaps we would be marched on trek to the French in Canada and then ransomed, traded away for good English coin if we did not die of trials on the journey. Any weakness, and we would be murdered at once. I knew the stories. I remembered a once-captive woman in Boston whose little sucking babe had been jerked from her arms, its head dashed open with a mallet. Indians had no love for us, though they could be unexpectedly kind. Sometimes they made a child of ours their own, so that she grew up with strange gods and stamped in mad jigs in the firelight, forgetting her mother and father and all our lamplit knowledge handed down through generations. (Once a traveling trader told us of curious monsters and alien powers that lived in rocks and whirlpools and trees by a bend in a river, but whether he truly knew the myths and histories of the tribes or only fooled us with wild tales, I do not know.) The French, I feared, might be even quicker death-dealers than the savages, and I was glad of Father’s insistence that we learn something of the language of our enemy.

  I set Mary down, my back already aching, and headed for a hillock, now lit by the gold of sunrise. From there, I could find the hiding place. The fall before, my brother Joseph had knotted a string dyed with berries between trees, and our secret was thirty man-steps west from the end of the string. More than once we had practiced meeting in the woods, though in truth no one ever believes that such hard times will come to them. The godly talk of brave fortitude, but all of us are taken unawares by such change, I find, and are ever and always unready.

  “Why?” Mary resisted my hand and looked up at me. “What why? I don’t know.” In truth, I was roiled in my mind and unwilling to explain any why of hers.

  “I want Mother,” she said, her voice quavering in the still-cool morning air. She spun away from me as if she meant to traipse back to the house.

  I dived for her hand. “You would be clubbed senseless crossing to the door.”

  “I would not,” she retorted.

  I grasped hold of her rope-plait, tumbled down from her coif, and gave it a tug. “As soon as they have driven away the Indians, Mother and the others will meet us in the hiding place. We have to find it. Then she will come.”

  A scream broke the sky into pieces. I glanced up to see an eagle, floating magically on a current of air. Perhaps, I thought, the birds are fleeing the torches, shouts, and gunfire.

  “I don’t like it here,” Mary said, blinking up at me.

  “The forest is the storehouse of nature,” I said, though I had no wish for trees and hills and the fine meanders of streams. But I had heard some preacher call it so, back in Boston, before we traveled to the land near Falmouth. Perhaps he was quoting some Greek thinker, brave as he lectured to students among olive trees swept by a wind from the sea that might at any moment waft sails from barbarian kingdoms. Thousands of years later, I would have to find the courage to dare the wilds for Mary. Inside, I felt none so stout, my thoughts brooding on the nest of souls back at our small settlement.

  How strange to fear that God had turned his face from our families and allowed the wilderness to snatch at us! And yet our pastors in Boston had assured us that suchlike trials made us united with the obedience and sufferings of Christ, and that all our secret pains and future hardships were known to God before the worlds were made. Some words are easy enough in Sabbath meeting, hard when a body is cast houseless upon the world.

  “I want John and Joseph and Isaac,” Mary said. Her voice sounded forlorn to my ear, and I bent to embrace her. “I want my cousin Tom.”

  “Tom is helping, or perhaps he is already at the hiding place. We have to go on, or we won’t be where Mother knows to find us,” I said. “Shall I carry you?”

  I knelt down and let Mary clamber onto my back, binding her again with the linen cloth. The hem of my gown sagged, heavy with dew. The blanket sling Mother had tied around me earlier was now damp against my side. Mary settled against me, adding her heat so that I felt oddly warm and chilled at once.

  Bearing the solid weight of Mary’s seven years, I stumbled getting to my feet, and walked off in a hunched-over trudge.

  One way to reach the hiding place hugged the farthermost cleared lands of the farm. I would have been glad for ribbons of corn to make a low rustling and keep us company, even when I wandered just out of sight of the fields of flax and grain beyond the house and the big garden of beans, marrows, and pumpkins. But the farm was still nearly bare in May, the fields nigh-silent except for the patter of my shoes. Only occasionally did I catch the news of shots, a faint peppering.

  But at a low rise beyond the far fields, I hoped to scan the landscape and see across to our very doorstep.

  My footsteps quickened as I thought of the twenty-seven left behind inside the fortified house, my brothers, my parents, my aunts and uncles, their sons, and others who were as known and essential as family. The path to the hill was roundabout, and yet not so far from the farm that we could be assured of safety there. But a glimpse of the house walls would comfort me. Father always said that I was eaglet-eyed. I had a keen wish for news of the assault, and the light was now gold morning in the leaves. Birds were waking, singing us on our way.

  Catching a flicker of movement in the trees, I stiffened, pausing close to a trunk, my heart jumping and racing back and forth like a rabbit that spies the cat creeping forward, one paw in the air. And I saw a truth of the wilderness that I never wished to be revealed, though the sight is encamped in my mind as something strange and even beautiful. It seemed a piece of moving silk, drawn through the boles like floss needled in and out of linen warp and woof. I pressed one hand against the flittering of my heart. Mary shifted on my back and muttered two or three words I could not make out.

  The vision grew more distinct, came nearer, a fast-running stream of shadow that wove through trees. Birds shot from the brush, trilling and shrieking toward the light. What the gloom might be, I remained unsure until the current of dusk poured closer, flowing some twelve footsteps away from me: the darkness resolved into doglike shapes, and one of them swung his head and stared at me with pale eyes. No doubt she and her kind were fleeing the noise of muskets.

  The gaze went on and on. She seemed to plumb the deeps of me and to know me as God knows us, reading past the cage of bones, the garb of flesh. She might have stabbed me to the spot, so unable to move and hardly to breathe was I. Her face with those luminous eyes staked itself to my memory.

  All my life I had been warned of wolves, and now I had been observed and inspected by one. A line from Jeremiah burned through my mind and went out like a flame: Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of the wilderness shall destroy them: a leopard shall watch over their cities: everyone that goeth out thence, shall be torn in pieces.. . .

  To be touched by perilous sights and yet live is a rare fate. But it was mine that day. The wolves poured away, vanishing as if they had never been, and left me drenched in perspiration. Hadn’t I been warned that wolves were the hounds of Satan, ravenin
g through the hinterlands? Hadn’t they been so troublesome in many towns that large bounties were offered for every pelt of a wolf? And yet something nearly human had glowed in their eyes, and something lovely moved in their appearing and disappearing as if by some conjurer’s trick with a silk scarf—a feigned magic I had never seen but had heard about and imagined—made me stare after them, almost with regret at their passing.

  I knew not what to think, save that my fear for our safety was a returning stitch, catching again and again at the material of the day, the thread of that sewing twisted together with a fibril of imploring. My mother, my father, all my kin: inwardly they went along with me like that shadow flock of wolves, and their faces likewise veered to look at me with beautiful, unreadable eyes.

  God forbid that they fade away and melt into the forest like the wolves! Such was my prayer.

  Birds catapulted past us, caroling to the leaves and sky above. I remembered how Father said that the birds were the glory of the woodlands, that he knew neither so many nor so sweet as in the depths of the forest. When I looked to the east, I saw the rising bonfire of the sun and seemed to glimpse shapes like tumbling leopards, playing joyfully in flames.

  My face was wet. But I had no time for infant tears, so blotted my eyes on my sleeve and plodded on, my back sore from pickpack Mary. The undergrowth of briars and shrubs hampered my feet as I neared the slope, my first destination. By some trick of the wind or the shape of the land, I could hear shouts again, just little nicks at the air.

  At the hill, I wandered around the base before deciding on a path between stones, with what I hoped would be sufficient handholds. Though lowish, the way was rugged. I thought to let Mary down to climb, only to find that she had fallen asleep and left me alone in the wild.

  “As you will.”