Crane Pond

by Richard Francis

  A week ago, he went to visit young Sam at the home of Mr. Hobart, minister at Newton. Sam is helping with the chores in exchange for receiving tuition from Mr. Hobart, who is well-known as a teacher (Sam is thirteen now, time for him to get experience at living in another household). He asked if he could come home for Christmas and Sewall spoke to him sternly, telling him that Christmas was no different from any other day. Now he wishes he had taken another tack. God would understand the difference between Sam visiting home because it’s Christmas and Sam visiting home because he needs to visit home. It’s just that Sewall is frightened of confusing himself by making such fine discriminations. Perhaps he fears that Sam coming home would have felt like Christmas, whatever Christmas might feel like.

  There’s a sudden cry and Sewall starts, but it’s just a passing carter rebuking his horse, which is finding the going difficult. And the cart is piled high with large sections of dead pig. In fact a head is staring back at him from the top of the mound, its mouth laughing through the jiggling flakes. Sewall rushes out of the house, hails the carter. ‘Where are you off to?’ he asks.

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Do you know what day it is?’

  ‘It’s any other day to me.’

  ‘And to me.’

  The man tugs his lead-rein. ‘I have to go. I’m taking this to Goodhew, the butcher.’

  ‘So Goodhew is open today?’

  The carter turns back and gives him a sharp look. The last thing Sewall wants is to make him feel guilty because he’s working today. A solution suddenly presents itself. ‘Let me buy a piece of pork, my man.’

  ‘These are for the shop.’

  Sewall gets out his purse. ‘I will save my piece a journey. I’ll pay the shop price.’

  ‘I don’t know what the shop price is.’

  ‘Well, a good price.’ He takes out three shillings. ‘This price.’

  The carter’s eyes brighten. ‘It comes from Westfield, this pork does,’ he explains, perhaps hoping by giving the pork a pedigree to justify the amount of money he intends to accept.

  The pieces are very large, obviously intended to be subdivided in the shop. The tang of raw meat collides strangely with the iron of snowy air. The small eyes of the pig’s head resting on top of the mound look down at Sewall while he chooses. A little drift of snow on its scalp gives the effect of a wig. He becomes aware of other heads grinning at him from different places in the heap. He picks out a leg which proves almost too heavy to carry and staggers up his path with it while the carthorse sets off again, its hooves oddly thudless on the snow.

  His wife and Sarah are in the kitchen and look up in amazement as he enters bearing meat. ‘Husband, what have you done?’ asks Hannah.

  He looks down at the meat he is carrying like a mighty club. ‘I bought it from a passing cart,’ he explains. He gives the leg a swing and hoists it with a thump on to the table.

  ‘I was going to boil some eels and serve them on sippets,’ grumbles Sarah. ‘I had some off an Indian yesterday, for sixpence.’ She glares at the meat which is now lying on the table top like a whale washed up by the sea. ‘That leg of pork is enough to feed an army.’

  ‘We can have a feast,’ he says. Hannah gives him a sudden hopeful glance.

  He realises she thinks he must have relented. ‘To mark the absence of Christmas.’

  Hannah and Sarah decide to spit-roast the pork on the big fire in the main room. While this is being done, Sewall retires to his study to pray. He prays for Sam, over in Newton, that he may not feel too lonely or tired. He prays for his timid daughter Hannah, that she might blossom. He prays for his spirited daughter Betty, that she might be free of fear of hell. Or rather, since we must all fear hell, that being the whole purpose of hell’s existence, that she won’t be overwhelmed by fear of hell. That hell, in short, will simply be useful to her. Then for little Joseph, that he might fulfil his prophetic promise and become a man of God. And for baby Mary, that she might continue to thrive.

  He prays for his dead children too, for John, the firstborn, whose death followed Sewall’s failure to confess his sins when he was admitted into the South Church, for little Hull, who suffered from fits but lived long enough to say the word apple, for Henry, who snored gently until he died on a bleak December morning, for Stephen, whose entombment made the family weep so inconsolably, especially young Sam, and for Judith, his only lost daughter (so far).

  When they’d come away from the graveyard after consigning Judith’s coffin (bearing the year 1690 made with little nails) into the tomb, a man called out at them: ‘Pitiful dogs!’

  Sewall recoiled as if shot by an arrow, his hand over his heart. Tears sprang into his eyes. The abusive man looked embarrassed at his bull’s-eye and sneaked away. ‘Husband,’ Hannah said, squeezing Sewall’s arm, ‘take no notice. He’s addled in his wits.’

  Obviously that was true, but Sewall took no comfort in it at first. A man with no brains in his head might be the perfect vehicle to articulate God’s judgement. It was as if the lunatic had been licensed to tell him that Judith’s death was caused by his laxity in the matter of the pirates.

  When he’d returned from the trip to New York and discovered Hannah with the smallpox he had vowed to do what was right in future without taking notice of any man’s—or woman’s—objections. The smallpox had duly abated, but since then Sewall still found himself caring about what the world thought of him and fearing the disapproval of his peers. He wished to rise to a position of importance and influence in the community, and strangely you can only achieve that by allowing yourself to be influenced by others, as if influence is a sort of currency, to be given and returned.

  ‘He said dogs,’ Sewall had told Hannah.

  ‘I know he did, my dear,’ she said consolingly. His heart warmed at the thought that she could still wish to cheer him while she was trembling with grief herself.

  ‘I mean, he didn’t say dog, in the singular. Perhaps it wasn’t a remark directed at me.’

  ‘I think it was a remark directed at the world in general.’

  ‘Certainly you aren’t a pitiful dog, my love,’ he assured her. ‘Not even a lunatic could think that.’

  ‘I must admit to feeling a little pitiful, just at present,’ she’d told him.

  But whether the man’s barb was directed at him or not, Sewall is the pitiful one after all. Even after making that undertaking on his arrival from New York, he was perfectly aware, day in day out, that he was guilty of a myriad of tiny cowardices, of retreats from decisiveness, of allowing issues to be obfuscated by sensitivity to the opinions of others. God reprieved daughter Hannah in order to give him another chance, and when he failed to take it, confiscated baby Judith instead. Sewall’s lack of firmness created a kind of aperture in the tissue of things, through which his poor defenceless baby fell.

  Fourteen months after Judith’s death, Mary was born. Already she has survived for two months, and still shows no signs of illness or pining away. Sewall named her for Jesus’s mother in the hope that by invoking that imperishable womb he can ensure that his daughter has come out of Hannah’s without carrying within her some secret malady, and that her own tiny womb will grow to adulthood and nurture babies in its turn.

  Now, on Christmas Day 1691, Samuel Sewall kneels on his study floor while snowflakes fall past the window and around his house a pale and silent Boston goes about its daily business, and he prays that God will send him a sign that he has been forgiven for his weaknesses.

  Suddenly there’s a hubbub downstairs and then the door bursts open. He looks up startled from his devotions. Betty is there, panting and wide-eyed. She gulps with excitement before she manages to speak. ‘Father,’ she announces, ‘the house is on fire!’

  Sewall struggles to his feet, conscious of his awkward bulk, while his little girl, neat as a fish, spins round and runs back down the s
tairs again. He cries out after her, terrified that she might be heading back into an inferno, ‘Elizabeth, Elizabeth!’ (using her full name in this extremity, since God must be listening) while he descends into the smoke. His whole household seems to be in the main room, crisscrossing like ships in a fog. He blunders through them.

  ‘It’s just the chimney on fire,’ says his wife’s voice. ‘Calm yourself, my dear.’

  ‘I thought—,’ he says wildly, ‘—are the children—?’

  ‘Everyone is fine. Baby is with her nurse. I expect she’s still sleeping.’

  His voice chokes up. He had thought Betty was about to be taken from him, for his continued sins. He had thought that was the sign. But here she is, admiring the blazing hearth. He pretends he has a cough, caused by the smoke.

  ‘Father, must we run outside?’ Betty asks him joyously. Hearing her question Joseph lets out a kind of Indian war whoop.

  ’Will the house burn down?’ young Hannah asks. Unlike her brother and sister she is frightened.

  The hearth is a sheet of flame, and smoke is curling down from the chimney, but just at this moment along comes Bastian with a pan of water drawn from the hogshead that stands by the kitchen door (as per order of the Court of Assistants) in case of just this sort of emergency. ‘No,’ Sewall tells her, ‘Bastian will save the day.’

  ‘Your pork is the culprit,’ his wife points out. ‘It dripped fat into the flames.’

  Suddenly he feels in control. ‘Children,’ he announces magisterially, ‘when you remove the cause, you eradicate the effect.’ He wraps a handkerchief around his hand and lifts the spit from its rest, holding it aloft like a spear. The leg of pork, still skewered, is blackened and now looks as if it came from a smaller pig altogether. As soon as he has accomplished this, Bastian flings his pan of water.

  Sewall heads towards the kitchen like a standard-bearer, his family following him, clouds of steam from the hissing hearth following them. He puts the spit down on the table top and uses a poker to push the pork from it. Then he takes a knife and cuts a slice off the end. Within a black circle the meat looks well-cooked but eatable. ‘We shall make a good dinner of this after all,’ he announces.

  They have their feast to celebrate not celebrating Christmas in the kitchen since the hall is so smoky. While he eats Sewall reflects on the sign that has been sent him. The fire was like a picture of hell, though small while hell is limitless, and extinguishable while hell is eternal. Perhaps God is telling him that his sin in reprieving those pirates is not as great as he imagines.

  ‘I bought the pork this morning,’ he tells the children, wanting to remind them that purchases can be made on Christmas Day. ‘It’s from Westfield.’

  ‘Is that a good place for it to be from, father?’ young Hannah asks.

  ‘The very best place,’ Sewall assures her. He has no idea whether Westfield is indeed known for its pork, though the carter seemed to think so. ‘Let’s hope that our dear Sam is eating so well, over in Newton.’

  Yes, yes, agree the children, let us hope.

  ‘It’s excellent pork,’ says wife Hannah, ‘though it tastes a little of chimneys.’

  ‘Our little black cow is dead,’ says Bastian.

  ‘What?’ Sewall exclaims. It seems he has only to blink and someone or something dies: a child or an animal, or one of his white-oak trees on Hogg Island, the property he and Hannah own in the middle of Boston harbour. Last night he slept a restless sleep and at one point dreamed of moans and howlings that he thought (in his dream) must be coming from the damned in hell.

  He follows Bastian out of the back door and through thick snow to the cow’s stable. It’s late January and has been snowing since Christmas. In fact he had worried whether the cow was warm enough at night, though as she still produced their milk every morning he’d convinced himself she wasn’t coming to harm. That assumption must have been his blink.

  But the cow hasn’t died of cold. She is lying on her side with her throat torn. Her teeth are bared and the mirthless smile coupled with the smell of blood reminds Sewall of the grinning head on top of that cartload of pork on Christmas Day. ‘I had to hit her on the head with my big hammer,’ Bastian says. ‘She was in such distress.’

  ‘Who did this to her?’ Sewall imagines Indians creeping round the house, as he had that time when little Joseph made his prophecy. Only yesterday came news of an attack on York, a few miles north of Sewall’s home town of Newbury. The minister there was shot from his horse and killed along with fifty or so others, and about ninety people were captured, often a worse fate than dying outright.

  ‘A dog.’

  ‘A dog?’

  ‘A big dog. Its tracks are still in the snow.’

  Those moans and howls of his dream had been despairing moos and the triumphant baying of a hound!

  ‘I seen a big black dog around the place these last few days.’

  ‘It was black? Are you sure?’

  Bastian laughed. ‘Black as me, Mr. Sewall.’

  Many dogs are black; nothing extraordinary in that. But Sewall shivers.

  At breakfast, everyone is subdued—indeed tears roll down young Hannah’s cheeks, since she is the most softhearted of them all. Wife Hannah gives Sewall a meaningful glance. ‘I think, husband, that we need to draw a lesson from this sad event.’ For a moment Sewall’s heart pounds. Has she guessed his weakness? Perhaps he should confess it here and now, in front of his children, so that they know their father is a compromiser who sent pirates back to plague the seas. He looks at them in turn (though baby Mary is upstairs in her cradle, and Sam is oblivious over in Newton). Joseph would not understand. Betty is pale and tense already, no doubt worrying whether cows go to heaven or hell and which one she will find herself in in due course. Hannah clumsily wipes her eyes with the back of her hand—she would be frightened at the thought of bloodthirsty pirates on the loose.

  Confession will simply give the children an anxiety which by rights belongs to him. So instead he makes his prayer a general one, but concludes with an image appropriate to the fate of a dairy animal: ‘And may we trust in God, who will nourish our spirit and provide the breast of our supplies.’

  Hannah raises an eyebrow at the incongruity of God offering us His breast, but of course the deity is beyond, or rather inclusive of, gender difference. That must be so since men and women are both made in His image. This was explained to Sewall once by Cotton Mather, with much clearing of the throat and rolling of the eyes. He is interested in matters scientific as well as theological and is particularly happy when those two spheres come together. The vagina (Mr. Mather muttered) is a kind of penis in reverse; the ovaries are inward testicles. He was less certain about the womb, but there is a gland in the man’s body where the fertilising element is stored: perhaps that is a kind of womb. And of course both sexes have breasts, though the male kind is not made use of (but Thomas Bartolinus, in his Historiarum Anatomicarum Rariorum, writes of a Danish man whose breasts did contain milk).

  Because of this spiritual unity of the sexes Sewall can express the hope of one day being married to Jesus, though he often feels sad at the thought that in heaven he will no longer be married to Hannah, death being a kind of divorce.

  A few days later Mr. Cotton Mather comes to call.

  He is wearing a large black cloak, the shoulders besprinkled with snowflakes, and big boots. Also a wig but a small one, perhaps as a concession to Sewall’s feelings, with a little bow at the back. In fact diminutive wigs annoy Sewall even more than voluminous ones since they mimic more closely the hair the wearer would actually have possessed if he hadn’t cut it off to make the wig fit snugly. ‘Mr. Sewall, how are you?’ he asks.

  ‘Well enough, Mr. Mather. And you, I hope.’

  ‘I am very well indeed, thank you.’ He gives a little bow of acknowledgement. Then springs it on Sewall. ‘Strange news from Salem.’
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  Sewall can’t stop himself giving out a little groan. ‘Not those pirates?’

  Mr. Mather is taken aback in turn. ‘Which pirates?’

  ‘Those reprieved pirates. Hawkins and the others.’

  ‘No, no, not those—oh, but here’s another strange thing. Indeed I have it with me, I think.’ He digs into the pockets of his coat. ‘Yes, here it is, sent to me from England by my father.’ He takes out a sheet of paper and passes it to Sewall. ‘Take a look at that.’

  Sewall inspects it. ‘It’s a printed map of Boston harbour,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. But look at the bottom to see who fecit.’

  Sewall screws up his eyes to read the small print at the bottom. ‘It was made by Pound,’ he says, ‘Thomas Pound.’ Then, in a whisper: ‘Thomas Pound.’

  ‘The very one. He has been made a captain in the Royal Navy. And has drawn this very accurate map of Boston harbour. I had forgotten that you were concerned in that business of the reprieves.’

  Sewall looks at the paper again, hoping that Cotton Mather won’t notice his hand shaking. Certainly it’s a meticulous map of the harbour. His own property, Hogg Island, is shown in exquisite detail, with the bulk of Noddle’s Island just below it like a bat that is batting a little ball into the air. The hand that drew this would have been in the grave if Sewall had had his way. And now Pound has been promoted to a captaincy in the Royal Navy. Does that mean that the reprieves were the right decision after all? Or has he, Sewall, helped to turn the world upside down, so that pirates are now naval officers, and misrule is gathering momentum?

  ‘But what I meant,’ Mather says, ‘was the other one.’