A Measure of Light

by Beth Powning

  “’Tis so confusing. So confusing.”

  “It will pass,” Sinnie said. “Terrible things do fade away.”

  I forget. Her pain.

  Mary studied Sinnie, whose needles moved more quickly.

  And still she is a loving person.

  Mary stood before the Hutchinsons’ house. Anne was spreading linens on alder bushes. She straightened, hand to back. Her daughters, elbow-deep in a washtub, looked up. Wind lifted suds from the froth.

  “I come to bid you farewell,” Mary said. She clasped her hands to hide agitation. “We sail tomorrow.”

  They walked to a bench overlooking the cove. Beneath the hard blue sky, shadows defined each house, shed and barn—adding stripes to clapboards, edging each bundle of thatch.

  “Much hath changed in one year.” Anne spoke evenly, as if withholding different words.

  Distance, Mary thought—fifteen miles—would preclude the small, necessary stitches to knit the torn edges of friendship.

  “Despite this remove,” Mary began. She gazed southwards at the haze where land bled into sky. “Despite the differences between us, Anne, I wish you to know that you opened me to many things and that I am grateful. You did teach me that I might have my own thoughts, my own understanding, my own … communion.”

  “With the Holy Spirit, do you mean?”

  “Aye.”

  Anne turned on the bench and took Mary by the elbows.

  “Which I see you have lost.” She studied Mary, sternly, as if searching for unvoiced symptoms.

  Mary smelled her odour of smoke and lavender; saw how her skin was dry, sunken in pockets, quilled with fine lines.

  “If these are my last words to you, Mary Dyer, you must believe them to be true. You are a lily in the sight of God. You must pray, listen and wait.” Her words came weighted, now, as Mary had heard her speak to dying women. “The Holy Spirit will return to you.”

  She put out her arms and Mary, yielding, leaned forward.

  Heartbeat. And the body’s warmth.

  Anne stood, brushed down her skirts. Mary took a breath. What words she would say, she did not know, only felt that such tangled threads as had wrapped them should not be so easily broken; and then Anne turned and walked back towards her daughters and the steaming linens.

  THIRTEEN

  Massacre - 1643

  THE GRAPES HUNG IN CLUSTERS, dusted, translucent. Mary extracted one and laid it on her blue-stained palm, the pearly seeds just visible.

  “Is it not beautiful?”

  “’Tis beautiful to me that you say so, Mistress,” Sinnie said.

  Faint, startling lines on Sinnie’s face. Twenty-five, she must be. Her freckles, larger, no longer like pepper.

  Yet still so tidy, so tender.

  “I wonder if I will always be afraid during my pregnancies,” Mary murmured, so that the children would not hear.

  With every stirring in her womb, she had imagined horns, talons. The fight to dispel such imaginings had had an effect opposite to its intention. “A perfect baby,” the midwife had said, handing over the new child; and Mary had begun to weep, and could neither hold nor behold the infant.

  Her darkness remained for ten months.

  William had grown frustrated.

  “God hath blessed our enterprise,” he had said. He’d stood before her down-turned face, hectoring. Had he not sent them a perfect baby boy? Samuel had suffered no childhood illnesses. The land bore incomparable fruits, vegetables, grains and grasses. His various businesses prospered. These remonstrances had burst from him when he could no longer suffer her silence, her slow movements, or the days when she would not leave the house.

  Forsaken, she thought, gazing at the grape. Abandoned by God.

  She looked southwestward over the water, towards what she pictured as infinite forest, amidst which was Dutch territory—where Anne and her family had gone. Before leaving, she had written Mary to say that she had had a revelation from God to take her family—servants, children, even animals—away from the reach of the cursed English. “Winthrop doth write me,” Anne had written, “Telling me of his plans to annex Aquidneck: if he is successful, I am certain he will not tolerate me.”

  Mary planned a letter to Anne in her mind. I see in those around me that they are destined for paradise. I have felt that I was not so destined, nor ever would be, since it seemed that God had so removed himself from me that I was filled with darkness. And yet lately the light hath returned to the world, in my eyes, and I dare to hope that … Yet she would not write the letter, for she did not know where, or by what means, to send it.

  “William wants a large family,” she explained, seeing that Sinnie watched her. “To fill a big house.”

  Samuel followed one-year-old William along the vine-laden fence. Jurden and other men had built it the summer of their arrival, when William had decided to settle on these eighty-seven rich acres a mile north of Newport’s harbour.

  Nearby stood the new house with its massive stone chimney. Apple orchards and pastures filled with horses, cattle and sheep ran out into a broad point, surrounded by the waters of Narragansett Bay.

  “William says he shall build a larger house out there,” Mary said, studying the point.

  Sinnie, kneeling before her basket, followed Mary’s gaze.

  “’Twill be a goodly place,” she said.

  Samuel, eight years old, raised hands to just under Sinnie’s nose. He fanned them open and a cricket sprang into her face. Baby William, crawling in the summer-dried grass, paddled back at their laughter. Samuel dropped onto hands and knees and he and the baby swarmed away into the meadow, seeking more crickets, other treasures. Sinnie reached up, snapped stems, set bunches of sweet-smelling grapes into her basket.

  “I do think the next baby will be easier,” she said.

  Mary looked at her.

  She speaks with too much reassurance.

  Sinnie reddened. Neither spoke, conscious of the pause. Then Sinnie proffered her basket. “I think ’tis enough for our winter jam?”

  Mary nodded. She acquiesced in this small matter, as in larger ones. Sinnie had begun to run the house, as Jurden, now married, ran the farm. William came home each night from his mounting civic and business duties, gathered the boys on his lap. He looked over their soft-haired heads at Mary, perplexed, as if she had ceased to speak or understand their common language.

  Knocking. It was a rainy night in early October, and William set down his clay pipe, went to the door. Mary glimpsed a neighbour’s long, cautious face, heard a mutter pass between the men.

  “… from me, first … news …”

  Rain streamed from his greatcoat and wide-brimmed hat. William bid him enter.

  “What news?” Mary said, as the man sat. He did not answer at once but rummaged for his pipe.

  “I thought to tell you before you should hear it from anyone else, wrongly told in its particulars. You know that Anne Hutchinson took family, goods and servants and went to the Dutch territory.”

  “Aye, I did receive one letter from her.”

  He sipped at the pipe, breathed out the pungent smoke.

  “The governor of New Netherland ordered a massacre of the Siwanoy Indians. Eighty men, women and children were killed.”

  Mary laid her hand flat against her chest.

  “So the warriors set out for vengeance. A raiding party came to Anne’s home. We surmise she did not hide, as did her neighbours who told us the tale.”

  “She is not Dutch,” William said. “She would not have felt culpable.”

  “Indeed. Nor, knowing Anne Hutchinson, would she have had fear.”

  The man glanced at Mary.

  “The family was murdered. Cattle, hens, dogs … every living thing was put into the house and the house was burned to the ground.”

  The moment froze, pipe smoke, the man’s red hands.

  “I have heard reports of what they are saying in Boston,” he continued. “They say that the Indians of th
ose parts have never committed the like outrage on any one family. They are saying that the Lord heard our groans to heaven—and so picked her and her family out to be an example of Indian cruelty. Above all others. They say ’twas her final punishment.”

  William made an exclamation of disgust. He stood, thrust a log into the fire. Sparks showered upwards.

  Mary stared at the man.

  “That makes no sense. You do not think such?” she said.

  “Nay, this is more of their …” Disgust, like William’s. And shock. He looked kindly at Mary. “I am sorry. I know you did love her.”

  Her forehead was pressed against the cold windowpane.

  … a warm day, crickets feasting on fallen apples. Her neighbours, warning her and her family to beware, nonsense, she would have retorted, I have always had friendly relations with the natives on Aquidneck. Besides, we are not Dutch. The Lord will provide. Men in animal skins. Stepping up the path. Tie up your dogs, they would have said, and perhaps one of Anne’s boys—Francis? Zuriel?—did so. Did she die first? Was she spared the sight of her family being butchered? Or did she see them pile the bloody bodies on the Turkey rug that had travelled from Alford? Watch them smash the glass-windowed sideboard, hurl the Chinese vase into the fireplace? Lie bleeding, scalped, when the fire kindled and raced up her skirt? Did she watch a warrior grasp her son’s soft hair and slice a knife to …

  William threw off the bedclothes. “Mary, Mary.”

  He rose and went to her. She turned, let him gather her like a child. She wept, gasped.

  “Oh, Anne. Oh, Anne.”

  They stood holding each other, listening to the patter of rain.

  FOURTEEN

  Indian Summer - 1650

  THE DOOR STOOD OPEN, framing a dirt path lined with marigolds. At its end was a granite hitching post; beyond, the patchwork of fields and pastures running down to the sea.

  Sinnie set down a bowl of mashed turnips on the table between Mary and William. Steam spiralled, blue in the dusty September sunshine.

  Littlemary, five, retched. She slipped from the bench at the children’s table and fell to her hands and knees, where she vomited violently. She took a breath and broke into a wail until choked by another paroxysm of retching.

  The boys were on their feet.

  “Samuel, ride for Dr. Clark,” William rapped. He lifted the little girl in his arms, carried her up the stairs.

  Mary stood by the table, one hand clutching a napkin. The other hand fell slowly to her side.

  “Sit,” she said to the boys—William, Maher and Henry. They returned to the long bench. Baby Charles sat in an arrow-back high chair. “Sinnie, will you see that the meal is served and eaten?”

  Her heart raced.

  Dr. Clark bade William tighten a tourniquet around Littlemary’s forearm. He was a tall, sunken-chested man, spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose. The seams of his kersey doublet were filled with dust and crumbs.

  “I am sorry,” Littlemary whispered to her father. “I could not stop it.”

  She stiffened, fixed her eyes on the ceiling. The child had been taught to stifle complaints, protests, fears.

  They heard the patter of blood in the bowl.

  The physician straightened, wiped the lancet. “Good lass,” he said. “Now. Pain in the belly? Yes? Headache?”

  To his questions, Littlemary whispered yes or no. Her eyes swivelled from the doctor to the ceiling.

  “Now I will tell you how to treat this,” the physician said, turning to Mary. “You must—”

  “Wait,” William said. He called down the stairs to Sinnie who was poised at the bottom, watching the boys while straining to hear the doctor’s words.

  “Ah, my poor bairn!” Sinnie entered, quick and dry as a sparrow. She knelt by the bed, stroking Littlemary’s forehead.

  When Sinnie’s indenture date had come and gone and still she was unmarried, William had declared that she need never leave their care. “As long as she wishes, I will pay her wages and provide for her.”

  The doctor glanced between servant and mistress. He spoke to Mary, but his eyes returned to Sinnie.

  “Have you a syringe? Yes? Good. Once a day, beet juice in each nostril.” He squeezed his fist before his nose. “I want you to take an egg, prick it with a large needle. Pour salt and rum into the hole. Bake it in the ashes. Give her that egg to eat when ’tis hard. Follow it with mint and fennel tea, steeped strong.”

  “How much rum?” Sinnie asked.

  The physician glanced at Mary. She saw that his respect was but a formality. She held out her hand, palm upward; fanned her fingers towards Sinnie.

  “She hath a better mind for these things,” she said.

  —

  For a week, Sinnie and Mary continued with daily chores and the fall harvest—drying herbs, braiding onions, hanging shell beans—while nursing the child.

  William fretted, beside himself with worry over his little girl.

  He had begun building the house on the point that he had been planning ever since coming to Newport. The great house, he called it. Mary looked out of Littlemary’s window. Sea, sky—the wind pressed between them making clouds race, clipping the tips of waves, bending the grasses. She could see William, a blue-coated speck, his voice carrying as he directed the workers who sawed, swung mauls and pushed barrows amidst the stacks of yellow lumber.

  Through the open window, the air bore the sweet, desiccated smell of spent goldenrod.

  Indian summer.

  Mary turned to the room. It bore the plainness of haste, built to endure a New England winter: white plaster walls, adzed timbers, brick fireplace. And on a roped oat-straw mattress, Littlemary, asleep beneath a quilt made by Aunt Urith, strips of gold and brown slanted around a central block of red, appliquéd with a silk bee. “To remember your mother’s garden,” Aunt Urith had said, giving it to Mary when she left for London. “You must tell your children of their Yorkshire grandmother.”

  This is what I have given the world.

  Children, as it was commanded of us on the ship.

  The women of Newport, like those in Boston, were continuously pregnant or nursing, bearing child after child after child—until most, by the age of thirty, were haggard and gap-toothed.

  And I bear them in terror, no matter that each child since has been normal.

  William, Maher, Littlemary, Henry, Charles.

  With every birth, she fell more profoundly into despair. Sinnie had placed Charles, her sixth living child, to Mary’s breast and held him there, crooning, as Mary stared at the infant. She had no feeling for the baby or for herself. She was like a mote of dust, so weightless as to find no landing place.

  Soon afterwards, she had turned from William’s caresses.

  “Please,” she’d said. It was not to William that she had begged, but to whom, she knew not. Please.

  She listened to the thump of the mauls, the rasping of saws; and heard in the sound William’s restless search for betterment.

  In the meeting house, Mary closed her eyes. Littlemary sat beside her, bravely upright although she was white-faced and weak.

  “We read in 2 Corinthians 3:6: ‘Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the Spirit: for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.’ ” The minister followed Anne Hutchinson’s teachings.

  Within ourselves, we may apprehend God.

  So Anne had told her, in her strong voice. Thinking of Anne, Mary felt such a sickening as a child feels before punishment.

  She looked at the bent heads of the Newport women. She worked side by side with them at whangs, spoke with them of pickles and radishes, of flax and thistles; they met her eyes with bland friendliness and she wondered what they said about her. They must respect her as the wife of a successful farmer, merchant and politician. Yet her education accorded only wariness, resentment. And since, after the birth of each child, she did not invite the women for ale and cakes but, rather, vanishe
d from view, the other wives were affronted. They did not visit or send food.

  She no longer prayed nor asked for forgiveness. God’s silence was absolute and the light of the world was not hers, neither beauty nor joy nor peace—the baby’s face beneath his pudding cap, wild roses in a pewter pitcher. She was restrained as if by a forbidding hand. Feel no joy. This is not for you.

  She turned her eyes to the window and watched the silent, tossing leaves. She had become a vessel for bearing children, never knowing when God might see fit to send another monster or call home the tiny creatures.

  “Let us now give thanks for the life of Littlemary Dyer,” the minister said.

  Only last week she had stood behind two men in Newport. They did not see her, and she had heard one tell the other of a newly published pamphlet. “New England Heretic, Mother of a Monster,” he’d murmured.

  Fury had pushed her past, shaken by the same violent impulse that had made her stand at the Boston meeting house and walk down the aisle with Anne.

  August 1650

  My beloved Mary,

  I must needs report the death of your Uncle Colyn. He rose to withstand the raging of a client who was distraught over a settlement and did blame your uncle. I heard the shouts and ran from the surgery but my husband had fallen. ’Twas too late, there was naught to do. He lies in the churchyard with your parents and brother.

  I would have you come home once more before I die, for depart I will, soon, called by my Lord. A dimness comes over my eyes and a doddering to my limbs. I know that I bear disease. ’Tis new and I despair, for I have many demands upon me, a child arrived this day with oak splinter in the eye …

  The children came through the door carrying baskets of mottled yellow apples. They poured the overripe fruit into wooden basins with a knocking rumble, went out for more. Over the fire, a kettle of beans hung from its pothook, making quiet slaps. The smell of baking bread wafted from the oven as Sinnie swung open the iron door and thrust her arm into the heat to tap the crusts.