When I got back, I fumbled in the rain with the overzealous knots I’d tied until I got the ladder free and then I hauled it around the back of the apartment. I was drunk, yes, but cautious too—if anyone had seen me, in the dark, propping a ladder against the wall of an apartment building, even my own apartment building, things could have gotten difficult in a hurry. I couldn’t very well claim to be painting, could I? Not at night. Not in the rain. Luckily, though, no one was around. I made my way up the ladder, and when I got to the level of the bedroom the odor hit me, a rank fecal wind sifting out of the dark slit of the window. The cat. The cat was in there, watching me. I was sure of it. I must have waited there in the rain for fifteen minutes or more before I got up the nerve to fling the window open, and then I ducked my head and crouched reflexively against the wall. Nothing happened. After a moment, I made my way down the ladder.
I didn’t want to go in the apartment, didn’t want to think about it, didn’t know if a cat of that size could climb down the rungs of a ladder or leap twenty feet into the air or unfurl its hidden wings and fly. I stood and watched the dense black hole of the window for a long while and then I went back to the car and sat listening to the radio in the dark till I fell asleep.
In the morning—there were no heraldic rays of sunshine, nothing like that, just more rain—I let myself into the apartment and crept across the room as stealthily as if I’d come to burgle it. When I reached the bedroom door, I put my eye to the peephole and saw a mound of carpet propped up against an empty cage—a den, a makeshift den—and only then did I begin to feel something for the cat, for its bewilderment, its fear and distrust of an alien environment: this was no rocky kopje, this was my bedroom on the second floor of a run-down apartment building in a seaside town a whole continent and a fathomless ocean away from its home. Nothing moved inside. Surely it must have been gone, one great leap and then the bounding limbs, grass beneath its feet, solid earth. It was gone. Sure it was. I steeled myself, pulled open the door and slipped inside. And then—and I don’t know why—I pulled the door shut behind me.
The Doubtfulness of Water:
Madam Knight’s Journey
to New York, 1702
BOSTON TO DEDHAM
THE ROAD WAS DARK, even at six in the evening, and if it held any wonders aside from the odd snug house or the stubble field, she couldn’t have said because all that was visible was the white stripe of heaven overhead. Her horse was no more than a sound and a presence now, the heat of its internal engine rising round her in a miasma of sweat dried and reconstituted a hundred times over, even as she began to feel the repetition of its gait in the deep recesses of her seat and that appendage at the base of the spine her mother used to call the tailbone. Cousin Robert was some indeterminate distance ahead of her, the slow crepitating slap of his mount’s hooves creating a new kind of silence that fed off the only sound in the world and then swallowed it up in a tower of vegetation as dense and continuous as the waves of the sea. Though it was only the second of October, there had been frost, and that was a small comfort in all of this hurt and upset, because it drew down the insects that a month earlier would have eaten her alive. The horse swayed, the stars staggered and flashed. She wanted to call out to Robert to ask if it was much farther yet, but she restrained herself. She’d talked till her throat went dry as they’d left town in the declining sun and he’d done his best to keep up though he wasn’t naturally a talker, and eventually, as the shadows came down and the rhythmic movement of the animals dulled their senses, they’d fallen silent. She resigned herself. Rode on. And just as she’d given up hope, a light appeared ahead.
AT DEDHAM
ROBERT HER COUSIN leaving her to await the Post at the cottage of the Reverend and Madam Belcher before turning round for Boston with a dozen admonitions on his lips—She should have gone by sea as there was no telling what surprises lay ahead on the road in that savage country and she was to travel solely with trusted companions and the Post, et cetera—she settled in by the fire with a cup of tea and explained her business to Madam Belcher in her cap and the Reverend with his pipe. Yes, she felt responsible. And yes, it was she who’d introduced her boarder, a young widow, to her kinsman, Caleb Trowbridge, only to have him die four months after the wedding and leave the poor woman twice widowed. There were matters of the estate to be settled in both New Haven and New York, and it was her intention to act in the widow’s behalf, being a widow herself and knowing how cruel such divisions of property can be.
An old dog lay on the rug. A tallow candle held a braided flame above it. There was a single ornament on the wall, a saying out of the Bible in needlepoint: He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth. After a pause, the Reverend’s wife asked if she would like another cup.
Sarah’s eyes rose from the fire to the black square of the window. “You’re very kind,” she said, “but no thank you.” She was concerned about the Post. Shouldn’t he have been here by now? Had she somehow managed to miss him? Because if she had, there was no sense in going on—she might just as well admit defeat and find a guide back to Boston in the morning. “But where can the Post be?” she asked, turning to the Reverend.
The Reverend was a big block of a man with a nose to support the weight of his fine-ground spectacles. He cleared his throat. “Might be he’s gone on to the Billingses, where he’s used to lodge.”
She listened to the hiss of the water trapped in a birch stick on the fire. Her whole body ached with the soreness of the saddle. “And how far would that be?”
“Twelve mile on.”
AT DEDHAM TAVERN
SHE SAT in a corner in her riding clothes while the Reverend brought the hostess to her, the boards of the floor unswept, tobacco dragons putting their claws into the air and every man with a black cud of chew in his mouth. The woman came to her with her hair in a snarl and her hands patting at her hips, open-faced and wondering. The Reverend stood beside her with his nose and his spectacles, the crown of his hat poking into the timbers overhead. Could she be of assistance?
“Yes, I’d like some refreshment, if you please. And I’ll need a guide to take me as far as the Billingses’ to meet up with the Post.”
“The Billingses? At this hour of night?”
The hostess had raised her voice so that every soul in the place could appreciate the clear and irrefragable reason of what she was saying, and she went on to point out that it was twelve miles in the dark and that there would be none there to take her, but that her son John, if the payment was requisite to his risking life and limb, might be induced to go. Even at this unholy hour.
And where was John?
“You never mind. Just state your price.”
Madam Knight sat as still as if she were in her own parlor with her mother and daughter and Mrs. Trowbridge and her two boarders gathered round her. She was thirty-eight years old, with a face that had once been pretty, and though she was plump and her hands were soft, she was used to work and to hard-dealing and she was no barmaid in a country tavern. She gazed calmly on the hostess and said nothing.
“Two pieces of eight,” the woman said. “And a dram.”
A moment passed, every ear in the place attuned to the sequel. “I will not be accessory to such extortion,” Sarah pronounced in an even voice, “not if I have to find my own way, alone and defenseless in the dark.”
The hostess went on like a singing Quaker, mounting excuse atop argument, and the men stopped chewing and held the pewter mugs arrested in their hands, until finally an old long-nosed cadaver who looked to be twice the hostess’s age rose up from the near table and asked how much she would pay him to show her the way.
Sarah was nonplussed. “Who are you?”
“John,” he said, and jerked a finger toward the hostess. “’Er son.”
DEDHAM TO THE BILLINGSES’
IF THE ROAD had been dark before, now it was as if she were blind and afflicted and the horse blind too. Clouds had rolle
d in to pull a shade over the stars and planets while she’d sat listening to the hostess at the tavern, and if it weren’t for the sense of hearing and the feel of a damp breeze on her face, she might as well have been locked in a closet somewhere. John was just there ahead of her, as Cousin Robert had been earlier, but John was a talker and the strings of his sentences pulled her forward like a spare set of reins. Like his mother, he was a monologuist. His subject was himself and the myriad dangers of the road—savage Indians, catamounts, bears, wolves and common thieves—he’d managed to overthrow by his own cunning and heroism in the weeks and months just recently passed. “There was a man ‘ere, on this very spot, murdered and drawn into four pieces by a Pequot with two brass rings in ‘is ears,” he told her. “Rum was the cause of it. If I’d passed by an hour before it would have been me.” And: “The catamount’s a wicked thing. Gets a horse by the nostrils and then rakes out the innards with ‘is hinder claws. I’ve seen it myself.” And again: “Then you’ve got your shades of the murdered. When the wind is down you hear them hollowin’ at every crossroads.”
She wasn’t impressed. They’d hanged women for witches in her time, and every corner, even in town, seemed to be the haunt of one goblin or another. Stories and wives’ tales, legends to titillate the children before bed. There were real dangers in the world, dangers here in the dark, but they were overhead and underfoot, the nagging branch and open gully, the horse misstepping and coming down hard on her, the invisible limb to brain her as she levitated by, but she tried not to think of them, tried to trust in her guide—John the living cadaver—and the horse beneath her. She gripped the saddle and tried to ease the ache in her seat, which had radiated out to her limbs now and her backbone, even her neck, and she let her mind go numb with the night and the sweet released odors of the leaves they crushed underfoot.
AT THE BILLINGSES’
SHE WOULD NEVER have known the house was there but for the sudden scent of wood smoke and the narrowest ribbon of light that hung in the void like the spare edge of something grander. “If you’ll just alight, then, Missus,” John was saying, and she could feel his hand at her elbow to help her down, “and take yourself right on through that door there.”
“What door?”
“There. Right before your face.”
He led her forward even as the horses stamped in their impatience to be rid of the saddle. She felt stone beneath her feet and focused on the ribbon of light till the door fell inward and she was in the room itself, low beams, plank floor, a single lantern and the fire dead in the hearth. In the next instant a young woman of fifteen or so rose up out of the inglenook with a contorted face and demanded to know who she was and what she was doing in her house at such an hour. The girl stood with her legs apart, as if ready to defend herself. Her voice was strained. “I never seen a woman on the road so dreadful late. Who are you? Where are you going? You scared me out of my wits.”
“This is a lodging house, or am I mistaken?” Sarah drew herself up, sorer than she’d ever been in her life, the back of a horse—any horse—like the Devil’s own rack, and all she wanted was a bed, not provender, not company, not even civility—just that: a bed.
“My ma’s asleep,” the girl said, standing her ground. “So’s my pa. And William too.”
“It’s William I’ve come about. He’s the Post, isn’t he?”
“I suspect.”
“Well, I’ll be traveling west with him in the morning and I’ll need a bed for the night. You do have a bed?” Even as she said it she entertained a vision of sleeping rough, stretched out on the cold ground amidst the dried-out husks of the fallen leaves, prey to anything that stalked or crept, and she felt all the strength go out of her. She never pleaded. It wasn’t in her nature. But she was slipping fast when the door suddenly opened behind her and John stepped into the room.
The girl’s eyes ran to him. “Lawful heart, John, is it you?” she cried, and then it was all right, and she offered a chair and a biscuit and darted away upstairs only to appear a moment later with three rings on her fingers and her hair brushed back from her brow. And then the chattering began, one topic flung down as quickly as the next was taken up, and all Sarah wanted was that bed, which finally she found in a little back lean-to that wasn’t much bigger than the bedstead itself. As for comfort, the bed was like a mound of bricks, the shuck mattress even worse. No matter. Exhaustion overcame her. She undressed and slid in under the counterpane even as the bed lice stole out for the feast.
THE BILLINGSES’ TO FOXVALE
SHE AROSE stiff in the morning, feeling as if she’d been pounded head to toe with the flat head of a mallet, and the girl was nowhere to be seen. But William was there, scooping porridge out of a bowl by the fire, and the mistress of the house. Sarah made her own introductions, paid for her bed, a mug of coffee that scalded her palate, and her own wooden bowl of porridge, and then she climbed back into the rack of the saddle and they were gone by eight in the morning.
The country they passed through rolled one way and the other, liberally partitioned by streams, creeks, freshets and swamps, the hooves of the horses eternally flinging up ovals of black muck that smelled of things dead and buried. There were birds in the trees still, though the summer flocks were gone, and every branch seemed to hold a squirrel or chipmunk. The leaves were in color, the dragon-flies glazed and hovering over the shadows in the road ahead, and in the clearings goldenrod nodding bright on a thousand stalks. For the first time she found herself relaxing, settling into the slow-haunching rhythm of the horse as she followed the Post’s back and the swishing tail of his mount through one glade after another. There were no houses, no people. She heard a gabbling in the forest and saw the dark-clothed shapes there—turkeys, in all their powers and dominions, turkeys enough to feed all of Boston—and she couldn’t help thinking of the basted bird in a pan over the fire.
At first she’d tried to make conversation with William (a man in his twenties, kempt, lean as a pole, taciturn) just to be civil, but talk seemed superfluous out here in the wild and she let her thoughts wander as if she were at prayer or drifting through the mutating moments before sleep comes. You should have gone by sea, Cousin Robert had said, and he was right of course, except that the rollicking of the waters devastated her—she’d been once with her father in a dingy to Nantucket when she was a girl, and once was enough. She could still remember the way her stomach heaved and the fear she’d felt of the implacable depths where unseen things—leviathan, the shark, the crab and suckerfish—rolled in darkness. She’d never learned to swim. Why would she, living in town, and when even the water of the lakes and the river was like the breath of mid-winter, and the sea worse, far worse, with men falling overboard from the fishing boats and drowning from the shock of it? No, she would keep the solid earth under her feet. Or her horse’s feet, at any rate.
Sure progress, the crown of the day: there was the sun, the solemn drapery of the forest, birdsong. She was lulled, half asleep, expecting nothing but more of the same, when suddenly a small thicket of trees detached itself from the wood and ambled out into the road so that her mount pulled up and flung its near eye back at her. It took two catapulting moments for the image to jell, and then she let out a scream that was the only human sound for twenty miles around.
The thing—the walking forest—was bearded and antlered and had eyes that shone like the Indian money they made of shells. It produced a sound of its own—a blunt bewildered bleat of alarm—and then it was gone and William, taciturn William, was there at her side. “It’s nothing to worry yourself over,” he said, and she saw that he was grinning as if he’d just heard a joke—or formulated one. He had a story to tell at the tavern that night, that’s what it was, and she was the brunt of it, the widow from Boston who wouldn’t recognize a—what was it, a moose?—if it came right up and grazed out of her hand.
AT FOXVALE
THE BOARD WAS primitive, to say the least, Sarah sitting at table with William while William dis
charged his letters to Nathan, the western Post, and the hostess bringing in a cheese that was like no cheese she’d ever seen. Eating was one of her small pleasures, and at home she always took care with the menu, serving up fish or viands in a savory sauce or peas boiled with a bit of salt meat, fresh roasted venison, Indian corn and squashes and pies—her speciality—made from the ripe fruit of the season, blueberry, raspberry, pumpkin, apple. But here the woods gathered close so that it was like night in the middle of a towering bright day, and there were none of the niceties of civilization, either in the serving or the quality. The cheese—harder than the bed she’d slept in the night before—barely took to the knife, and then it was a dish of pork and cabbage, which looked to be the remains of dinner. She found that she was hungry despite herself—ravenous, actually, with the exercise and air—and she took a larger portion than she would have liked.
“Tucking in there, Missus, eh?” William observed, giving her that same grin even as he nudged Nathan, and here was another story.
“We’ve been on the road since eight in the morning,” she said, wondering for the life of her what was so amusing about sheltering in a hovel in the woods fit only for a band of naked savages, “and it’s now past two in the afternoon. A woman has got to eat, if only to keep up her strength.” She was throwing it back at them, and why not—that was how she felt. And she was hungry, nothing to be ashamed of there. But the sauce was the strangest color—a purple so deep it was nearly black—and the thought came to her that the hostess had stewed the meal in her dye kettle.
Tooth and Claw Page 27