Charis in the World of Wonders Read online

  Perhaps talking to one’s own self is a variety of madness, but it was a madness I found to be of some small comfort. Perhaps the human syllables suggested that there would be again a purpose in talk, or that the family would sit again in the cool of the evening after laboring in the fields, my mother and I stitching at a garment for one of the fast-growing boys and listening to Father read by candlelight—or holding still from work as he led us into prayer, the crooked arms of moon-clutching trees and the claws of wild men and animals barred from the door.

  My feet crushed the thorns and nameless spring plants as I stitched my way upward, bent forward so that my sister would not slither and fall.

  Near the top, I let Mary slide to the ground. She curled up on a patch of soft spring growth as peacefully as if it were a trundle bed. Her hair was pasted to her damp cheek in curls, her child’s cap dangling by a lace. The linen cloth that had secured her to my back now made a covering to keep off the midges and flies, though by the red welts on her arms and neck, I knew that she had been bitten on the march through the brush. In the woods near Falmouth live humped black insects that swoop and do not sting but nip the flesh with such celerity that the victim never knows until too late.

  “No thorns in Eden,” I said aloud. Nor pricking flies. Nor the dead skins of animals on our feet.

  I dropped the sling with its contents onto an outcropping of stone and realized that the blanket was my mother’s best, a thin-woven wool with a brushed nap, dyed indigo with a stripe of chamomile yellow near each end. The news startled me, made me more apprehensive than before. Why had she sent me off with such a choice covering, the fine thread spun and dyed with her own hands and given over to Weaver Turell’s handiwork on the loom?

  The one most suitable to tie around a body, I told myself. Others were surely too thick and coarse.

  Uncomfortable in the open air where I might be spied from below, I sought the trees and ranged along the brink, slapping away insects and searching for a view of the house. After scrambling over rocks, I found a safe peep-hole through branches. The prospect revealed most of the front and the clearing before the house where stubs and stalks of last year’s corn halted and, in summer, rows of wortes ran up to the very foundations.

  “Mother,” I whispered.

  Clouds of smoke drifted in the yard. Several tiny bodies lay flopped before the door, but whether they were our men or theirs—likely the Mi’kmaq or Maliseet of the Wabanaki people, or perhaps the French—I could not tell for the obscurity and distance.

  I climbed onto a branch to secure a better look, just as a man with a torch loped from the barn and across the wortes-plot.

  “No, no, no—”

  He was struck before reaching the stone at the doorsill. In the field, the barn with a store of our hard-won flax and a portion of last year’s harvest was ablaze. The fallen brand smoked against the earth and died.

  “Fire the house with our own burning tow, would you?” I gripped the trunk and peered outward.

  The wind shifted, and again I could detect the popping of guns and the cries, tiny bits of noise that chipped at the air. Streamers of smoke rose from the upper windows and gun slits where muskets were firing. Evidently we still held the house.

  One of the little figures vaulted through an open window and disappeared. Instantly, the body was hurled back out. When three others met at mid-front and began thundering at the paneling with clubs, the door swung open to a blast of fire. Though several toppled to the ground, the third Indian managed to drag a woman into view. Two men of our family sprang from the hall where she must have been loading muskets but were too late to stop the fellow from dashing her to the ground with a blow of an axe. The murderer plunged after her, downed by fire from an upper window. One of our men was hit and let go his musket, but another grasped for the weapon and towed his companion back inside.

  Mary woke and shrieked so violently that I leaped from the tree, landing with a thud and staggering into a run. But when I reached her, she was only fighting with the linen cloth around her face, and I pulled it roughly away.

  “What ails you, Mary? Are you hurt? Hush, be quiet this instant, or Indians will come and crack open your head with tomahawks. Like a bird egg smacked by a mallet. And then you will have something to wail over!”

  She stared at me, abruptly silent, and we both broke into tears, she for the fright she took from me, me from my own words.

  One of our men was hurt, and one of my aunts surely dead—my Aunt Mercy or Aunt Hannah, my Aunt Sarah or Aunt Rebecca. I could not contemplate that little doll flopped on the dirt as possibly my own mother. She had been on the second floor when I left and she would surely still be above stairs. So I told myself. Because some possibilities cannot be borne. To see my mother clubbed over the head. . . I prayed for the dead woman, whoever she was, and for all my blood kin and for Onesimus and Blue Jonas.

  Yet heat and anger sparkled in me like a burning line of gunpowder. I felt myself a mine of munitions set to explode. Hate and uncanny darkness roiled my mind, and I learned that a part of me could wish to maim or destroy all that threatened my kin.

  To calm myself, I kept my arms around Mary, and whispered, “Lord of all things in heaven and earth, let those we love shadow themselves and hide from raveners who would devour them.”

  I recalled my father saying that the Wabanaki tribes had their own customs and fashions of doing, which were not our ways but made a kind of sense to them, and that the English who had fared over the ocean now crowded and hemmed in many of the Indians. And many Wampanoags had died in some great, mysterious plague just before the English settled in this country. Our ministers called this the hand of God preparing our way, though Father, who was always of a singular cast of mind, said that God did not wish pestilence on any but that they find the fullness of life in Christ. All the same, I had scruples and could not find a chamber in my heart to pray for the French or the Indians, knowing many ruthless acts that had been visited upon our own people, merciless disembowelings, torturous slicing away of body parts of captives, and the battering open of heads as if a brain were only a walnut meat to be shaken from its shell. I could not pray, any more than others could sit listening to talk of ingenious torture and captivity without sickening. But I meant to. For aren’t we to pray for our enemies? It is hard when they are not like us and wish to murder everything we have ever loved and admired.

  “Is this our hiding place?”

  “What?”

  “Our hiding place,” Mary repeated.

  “No,” I said, “but there’s no hurry. I wonder if we’re not safer here, away from the woods. I expect no bears or leopards would ever lope this way.”

  “Not any such beasts as leopards.”

  “There are,” I said, “and green dragon-lizards and phoenixes and horned sea-unicorns and many another fantastic-seeming creature. The mind of nature is a very opal, packed with strangeness and as changeable as the color in the jewel.”

  “An opal,” she said, though I doubt now that she knew the word.

  I wanted to go back and survey the house and fields but knew that Mary should not behold such brutality as I had seen. She was young yet, although seven is age enough for many abhorrent things to be known.

  “Such harsh, uneven ways,” I said.

  “Charis—” Mary grasped at me as I rose. But I slipped away and shook the motes of earth from my gown, having concluded that I should search further and so be mistress of our nesting-ground.

  But in exploring the rest of the hilltop (for I had reflected that we might well linger here, where I could observe, from time to time, the ferocities of our enemies and assess how the defenses held at the house), I discovered the remains of a charcoal fire and some knapped flakes of stone. Raking my fingers through ash and remnants of sticks, I found no warmth. Still, I knew that the Indians often retraced steps and used the same paths on their excursions. The ones who built the fire might intend a return to the same site.

  Mary c
alled to me. “What is it?”

  “Hush,” I said, afraid even to tell my alarm.

  When I peered over the edge of the drop, the scene looked quiet. Perhaps we could repair to the house soon; perhaps we could watch and wait without the savages finding our refuge. Or perhaps we would be trapped on the hill, unable to escape. No, it would not do to stay. Feeling considerable reluctance, I took up the blanket sling and grasped Mary’s hand.

  “We’ll steal through the forest and find the hiding place now,” I told her.

  “I’m hungry,” she said.

  I’m worried, I thought, warm with worry.

  “And weary and dirty, too,” I said. “But it’s not far from here. And we will break fast with what Mother packed. Or I will dig us something to eat when we get there. The cache has carrots and parsnips and turnips. Maybe a basket of Indian corn to grind for meal, though we can’t make a fire. And there’s a stream nearby. We can wash, and we can drink as much as we like.”

  While striving to soothe, I began to feel impatient to be away.

  Mary was so stiff and unwieldy that I had to half hoist and half drag her down the hill. Before we were halfway to the foot, I was soaked with perspiration from the unpleasant combination of my fear of what I had seen and the effort of managing Mary. Her resistance added fuel to the bonfire of my feelings, and I struggled to remain calm. She wore the rebellious aspect that I recognized from when she had to work at her sampler, and I did not have Mother’s knack of forcing her will with kindness and firmness. I knelt and bid her climb onto my back, but she did so most unwillingly.

  “Mary, go aright and help me more,” I said, “as you would our mother.”

  “No,” she said.

  “You make this journeying harder than it is,” I told her.

  “No,” she said again.

  “Do not be so choleric!”

  At that, she thrashed to and fro until I feared we might fall down the slope. I snatched at her fingers. “Mary, please—”

  Wrenching her hand from my damp grip, Mary thrust at me and tumbled backward. Though I whirled about and grasped at her skirts, I was not quick enough to keep her from spilling onto the ground. She looked at me, all defiance vanished, and tears welled in her eyes, though she was so quiet that it took me some moments to realize that my little sister had gashed her head on a jagged outcropping of stone.

  Not until I glimpsed with a new access of fear the blood pooling and sopping the earth did I understand. The cut bled smartly, the blood clotting in the hair at the base of the skull, so that I could not tell how dire the blow was and simply set to work on bandaging it with our length of linen. What else could be done? I was lucky to have the cloth. Tears blurred my own sight, and I longed for our mother more than ever before.

  While Mary’s initial silence and the sight of the injury made me anxious, her sobs afterward made me cringe and fancy that she would call down arrows on our heads.

  “They will clip and carve us, they will prick us with arrows,” I hissed at her. “They do not care how much they hurt us. So stop that roar or you will have a worse stroke soon!”

  She cried jerkily but more softly and at last looked at me with what I could have borne better if it had been choler or reproach. The shock, it seemed, had quieted her distress. Her countenance showed only emptiness, innocent of thought or feeling.

  “Come.” I hauled my sister to her feet. “Can you walk? You must. It is time to flee away.”

  She trailed me obediently, hanging on to my dress and leaving damp handprints on the green fabric. I fear that I may have thought almost as much about the harm to my gown as my anger or what was worse, the harm to Mary. My mother had spun thread and over-dyed woad blue with goldenrod. Afterward, she carried the yarn to our skillful Boston weaver, and we sailed away with a great bolt of green cloth for waistcoats and gowns.

  If only we had stayed there in company with Goodman Turell and the bakers and brewers and builders, all of whom made life easier and fairer in aspect! My father was not like most who were drawn to the Fort Loyall and Falmouth area, those who felt a laxity in their fellows and wished to renew the original stringency of thought that sent our people across the sea to build a shining New Jerusalem. Oh, he was a devout, a covenanted man, but more than that he owned the pluck and heart of an explorer and was undaunted by the wilderness that made so many others quake and cling to the seashore like oysters. If only he had been a little more retiring, more circumspect in his desires. . .

  My mind rambled through the tangled brush of such useless thoughts, now and again returning to the image of the woman—one of ours!—clouted on the head at our doorsill. But my feet knew the ways that Mother had made us practice until we were weary of obeying, and before long I discovered the red string half-hidden in some running cedar.

  Mary stopped when I did, swaying in place, a bunch of my gown in her fist. “Hurts,” she said.

  With renewed apprehension, I saw that the linen strip I had wound about her head was almost black with blood. Fresh blood still seeped from the wound and had stained to redness the coif dangling by its strings. Midges wove a moving halo around her face.

  “See if you can find the scarlet vein in the earth,” I said, thinking to distract and make a kind of game of finding the hiding place.

  She let go of my skirts and looked about her. “I see it! The same as my gown.” She caught up the yarn and showed how, though faded from rain and sun, it matched the cloth. Crumbs of dried leaves were caught in the fibers and sifted onto her bodice.

  “One of the Farriers—do you remember them, from Boston, or were you too little?—told me about seeing a man in London who played on a thread like that but pulled taut in the air. He danced and skipped and made little pirouettes.” I brushed the jots of leaves from her gown as I spoke.

  She pushed back the sweaty curls stuck to her cheek and looked up at me, forgetting her pain, forgetting where we were at the thought of such novelty. “Is that magic?”

  “No, it was his artfulness. He probably tripped and plummeted a thousand times before he could make such pretty motions on a string. Magic is not about practice, not about working hard to learn and master knowledge.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “Power, I expect.”

  Kneeling, I took the yarn from her fingers and wove it back through the running cedar and teaberry leaves—those and some other plants whose names I did not know.

  “Supernatural power,” I added. “Like the bundles Onesimus told me about when we lived in Boston. A tithingman chanced upon a sack of cloth beside a stream. Inside, someone had packed up a magpie treasure of nails and bent pins, a broken quarrel and pieces of bottles, shell buttons, bits of mica, and lumps of chalk. And Onesimus said that back in Africa, bundles like that one breathed forth magic.”

  “Why?”

  “He never explained. But they meant sweet fortune or healing or days without hazard.”

  Mary’s response, a comical little face of discontent, made me laugh. One remarkable thing that I learned that day was how impossible it is in the midst of alarms and worry and even pain—my poor sister!—to be despairing and melancholy in every instant.

  “Faire la moue,” I said, more to amuse myself than Mary, who was young yet and cared less for words and learning.

  She ignored me, intent on her own thoughts.

  “If I had magic,” Mary said, “I would make a land with always kind savages. No aches. And fly there with you and Mother and Father and the boys. And all our family.” She nodded, looked down at the thread, and began to step along it, putting a hand out to steady herself as she passed saplings and shrubs.

  “String-walker,” she said softly. “I am a string-walker.”

  I followed along, watching her feet move through the greenery, searching out the glimpse of color. Though pretty certain that my uncle Thomas in particular would have scolded me for dropping nonsense into Mary’s head, I did not reprove her. Who would not wish for an earthly country
of peace, and even hope that such magics could be white and fair?

  “Sewing land,” she said.

  “Yes, like a twist of silk that appears and disappears.”

  The blanket was unpleasantly hot against my back and side. I wondered whether I should pause and see what Mother had put inside. We were hungry and thirsty, and perhaps she had packed bread or dried meat. But even the sound of the sticks breaking under our feet daunted me; I would not pause.

  “My head. It hurts.”

  Mary kept on padding on the wisps of red that showed among the leaves, and I kept following after, all the time puzzling over what Mother would say if she could see us now. If she still lived! I did not think she would like talk of magical powers.

  “You know, Mary, that magic and spells are blasphemous. If you could conjure a land with no enemies and flit there, you would become the Devil’s own child. Because human beings cannot make something out of nothing, and we cannot fly.”

  “I could fly,” she insisted. “I would ride pickpack. On an angel with six wings.”

  “Heavenly beings are not the same as magic. It is their nature to do what we cannot.”

  Was magic always evil? I was not so sure where magic left off and right religion began, nor where the proper healing of women learned in herbs left off and charms and spells began. Had not Goody Cotton, back in Boston, boiled her nephew’s urine in a witch bottle with nails and pins to discover who had bewitched him? And in England, cunning folk were said to be useful healers. But Mother told us more than once never to rely on palmistry or “the turning of the sieve” or “book-and-key” to delve into mysteries, as others she knew in Boston had done to answer questions.

  Old as I was and with some accumulated wisdom in the ways of the world, I wished Mary’s angel would come and alight like the most impossible string-walker on our red yarn and offer us a pickpack ride. We would sail over the treetops and see where the eagles nest. We would find out if the butterflies, insects, and birds stitch in and out of the canopy the way little fish leap in and out of the shallows of the sea, or if above the trees the air is still and quiet.