The Pilgrim

by Hugh Nissenson

  I copied down my father’s words in swiftwriting, the cipher which I had learned at his behest from my schoolmaster, James Bolt, who wrote down my father’s sermons and lectures in cipher for four shillings a year. (My learning swiftwriting as a boy was a special Providence of God that enabled me to make copious notes and then write this Confession of Faith.) After I finished writing down his words, my father scanned the straight lines and curves on my paper and said, “The divers and sundry things that make up the natural world are ciphers writ by God and we must learn to decipher them, just as we have learned to foretell an early spring by the age of the moon at the beginning of January.”

  I was restless during my last year of Grammar School. I was convinced that I was not destined by God to serve Christ as His Minister. What was I to do with my life? Whither would I go? I envied the apprentices and idle boys of the town who, in the evenings, met to be merry, quaffed ale in the taverns, and played at cards and dice. After work, they lived for pleasure, with no thought of heaven or hell. On May Day, before dawn, they went into Conant’s wood with girls and gathered the dew to drink. Then they all danced around the Maypole on the village green. I fancied joining them in Satan’s revels. I confessed that to my father, who basted me with a stick.

  I welcomed his punishment, though it did no good. Puberty was upon me. The Devil often tempted me, and I surrendered to lust and oft had traffic with myself. I grieved for my soul and betook myself to God by praying. He did not respond to me.

  • • •

  Soon after I finished Grammar School, my father said to me, “My son, I will reveal my heart to you. I am much afraid of breaking the law of the realm because of the fate of the preacher Daniel Harvey, from Foxton. You would not remember him, but his memory festers in my mind. Some years ago, he was tried in London, tortured, and sentenced to death for having in his possession a sermon he wrote against wearing the surplice. Mind you, he never preached it but only wrote it out. He was racked, needles were pushed under his fingernails, and his private parts were burned with a torch. He was kept in an iron cage called the Little One in which he could not stand upright. The Lord took him during the third night.

  “Know your father for what I am—a sinful coward! I call for a reformation of the church but want the courage to set a proper example of a godly shepherd to my flock. A soiled surplice! I wear a soiled surplice. What a piddling protest to the papist Church of England. But I am sore afraid of the rack and the torch.”

  He then said to me, “Even though I’m a vile wretch who cannot close with Christ because of my cowardice, you must have reverence for me. You are enjoined by Scripture to honor me.”

  • • •

  Ere every Sabbath dinner, before the servants, Ben Tucker spake the following, taught him by my father: “O Lord our God, seeing thou hast ordained sundry degrees and states of men in this life, and among them Thou hast appointed me to be a servant, give me the grace to serve in my vocation faithfully.”

  Then my father always said, “The Lord’s Day is the market day of the soul, on which we lay on spiritual food for the following week. It is a day that enriches the Elect.”

  He fasted on the Sabbath before his morning’s sermon. After he and his household returned home to dine, he locked himself in his chamber for about the space of an hour. When I inquired of him what he did therein, he replied, “I pray for forgiveness.”

  My father gave communion to his congregation about ten times a year. It was the practice of the former Minister of St. James to give communion to servants and other common people at five in the morning, with a cheap claret, whilst masters and dames, their children, rich tradesmen, and their families took communion at nine of the clock with a fine muscatel. Over the objection of my father’s church wardens, who wanted to spare the cost and preserve the order of the realm, he gave communion to his whole congregation at five in the morning and served it with the dear muscatel. He said to me, “There is but one division in my congregation—nay, the entire world—and that is between the damned and the saved.”

  During my last two years at Grammar School, I often visited Mary in her small cottage on Old Parish Lane. My father bade Ben accompany me, carrying his oaken staff, to protect me from the nightwalkers with cudgels and knives who had eluded the watch. I remember in particular trudging through the mud one wet October night. We passed The Sign of the Rose on New Street, outside of which, amongst a crowd, the constable had hold of Squire Wilton, who had stabbed the tapster of the inn to the heart. I looked through the window and espied the tapster’s corpse lying upon its back in a puddle of blood upon the floor. The sole of his left shoe had a big hole therein.

  Arriving at Mary’s cottage, I said to her and Ben, “It was the first corpse I have ever seen.”

  ’Twas Mary who rejoined, “Aye, but not the last, my dearest boy.”

  Said I, “What makes you say so?”

  “I dreamed it,” said she.

  It began to rain. Mary’s cottage had a leaky thatched roof. Her four daughters, aged in years from two to twelve, were huddled together in a dry corner, midst the three spinning wheels and the loom. They kept their sow within-door.

  Mark kissed Mary tenderly on the forehead. The sow snorted. Mary divided a big round cheese that she had taken with my father’s permission. Mark denied himself a bite. He had passed the day keeping watch over his master’s cows as they grazed upon the stubble of his master’s harvested corn. Mark smelled of cow dung. Bess, being twelve years of age, had tended her younger sisters while spinning yarn for Wells, the clothier.

  Said Mary, “That tapster was a bottle-nosed rogue. He’s burning in hell, with a burst stomach and steaming guts.”

  • • •

  Toward the end of December, we had extreme frost and much snow, so that many died of cold upon the highways. The town was filled with wandering beggars, bedlams, and vagabonds. My father examined them all, mixing wholesome instructions with severe reproofs. If they had passes to travel by, he scanned them thoroughly, and when he found them false or counterfeit, he sent for the constable, who made new passes and sent the wanderers to their last place of settlement or birth.

  My father was righteous also unto the poor of Winterbourne. In January, five small thatched houses at the west side of the North gate burnt, casting their twenty-one ragged inhabitants out into the icy street. My father collected seven pounds and ten shillings in our three churches and distributed it amongst them.

  All that winter, the smallpox was very thick in Winterbourne. Ten men and women, twelve elder folk, and thirteen children died. The deeply pitted faces and hands of the survivors sickened me. My father, the two other rectors in the town, the barber-surgeon, and our physician, Doctor Troth, tended the stricken. Doctor Troth’s fee for his ministrations was two shillings; only five people could afford his service. He believed that having survived the malady in his childhood, he could not catch it again. (I could not look upon his pitted face or hands without being desirous of vomiting.) My father declared special days of prayer, fasting, and humiliation for his congregation so that God might have mercy and remove the pestilence from His sinful people.

  I lived in dread of dying from the sickness or, worse, becoming disfigured from it. I suffered the insufficience of faith in my soul. I zealously kept the Sabbath, not daring to eat or dwell upon irreverent things. I devoted myself to listening to my father’s sermons, reading Scripture, and praying. It availed me nothing; my soul stayed plunged in the depths. And though I could not know it then, the visitation of smallpox was a dire portent to me from Heaven, being the reason why I have dwelt at length upon it here.

  • • •

  Come March, I worked with Ben in my father’s garden. We planted red cabbage, carrots, spearmint, onions, sage, Runcival peas, lavender, sorrel, roses, and parsnips, &c.

  I remember Ben, after a rain, hanging his shirt to dry upon a gooseberry bush in the
garden. I gazed upon his scars, saying, “I have never heard you trouble yourself about the state of your soul.”

  Ben answered in his mild voice, “My soul was full of sores that Christ, through your father, hath healed. I’m already in Abraham’s bosom. This world be now heaven enough for me.”

  • • •

  Mary was near her time. In the beginning of July, a neighbor of Mary’s sought me out at home. Mark, haunted for three months by a quivering fever, was taken by the Lord in June. And it seemed Mary was near her time as well. The neighbor said that Mary had, ten days before, been delivered of a boy she had named Mark. Satan, the enemy of mankind, had blinded Mary’s judgment. She told her aforementioned neighbor, “Without a father, my babe is better off dead than alive.”

  I hastened to visit her, with a loaf of white bread, a cheese, some dressed beef, and a pot of ale in my knapsack. Mary’s four daughters were with kindly neighbors. She nibbled the beef, took one draught of ale, and said to me, “Look you, my dear boy. Our sow died of the white measles. I sold the loom for money to pay a barber-surgeon to thrice bleed my poor Mark and provide him with medicine. I need money for food. I have not tuppence left to rub together. I will come to ruin and disgrace by reason of poverty.”

  She wore a filthy shift. She said, “My poor boykin hath the hiccups and puked on me.” While suckling her babe, she said thrice, “I must go to work. I must go to work. I must go to work.”

  The babe fell asleep. She laid him in his basket, lay down upon a bundle of moldy straw, and slept. I swilled the rest of the ale and watched over her for almost four hours. Along about five of the clock in the afternoon, I could not hold my water any longer and went outside to relieve myself. When I returned, I found her hugging the naked little corpse to her breast. The babe’s much swelled little tongue stuck out between its tiny purple lips.

  Mary said, “My poor boykin—my little heart—puked on me again, and I strangled him. The Devil bade me do it!”

  She hugged the little corpse to her breast and sang a song I knew well from street singers in the town.

  O death, rock me asleep,

  Bring me to quiet rest,

  Toll on thou passing bell,

  Let thy sound

  My death tell,

  For I must die,

  There is no remedy,

  For now I die.

  God forgive me, I loved her still, even though she was a murderer.

  Mary was arrested, imprisoned, and, at the next session of the Assizes, condemned to be hanged. Justice Baron Digby allowed her to speak.

  “Pity me!” said Mary. “I was doomed by God ere the creation of the world to harken unto Satan and strangle my babe—my precious boykin!—that just after he lived ten days. I am damned! I will burn in hellfire. So pity me! Damned ere the creation of the world! Wherefore? What did I do ere the creation of the world to warrant this fate? Answer me! Who is this hurtful God that hath condemned me? Damn Him that damned me!”

  Justice Baron Digby ordered Mary to be gagged.

  My father and I visited her in gaol upon the day before her hanging. Her four daughters were there to bid her farewell. She enjoined my father, “Good master, my poor daughters here now abide in the Hospital, amidst other orphans, wherein they spin and card and make bonelace from before the dawn till the coming of the night. Look in on them from time to time, I beseech thee.”

  I kissed her calloused palms and wet them with my tears. I said, “You are a murderer and a blasphemer—a damned soul—but I love you. God forgive me, I shall always love you!”

  She said, “Thank you, master, for your kind words. I love you, too.”

  Upon the appointed day, at noon, Mary was taken up Gallows Hill in a cart. John Barker, the hangman, was the executioner in Cranborne gaol. My father gave a sermon on Romans 6:23, “For the wages of sin is death.”

  When Barker put the noose about Mary’s neck, she cried out, “Lord, make this quick!”

  My father bade me to go home. As I departed, I watched him and Ben make their way to the foot of the gallows. I could not bring myself to look upon my beloved Mary being hanged. On my way to the parsonage house, I heard the crowd roar on Gallows Hill.

  Ben and my father soon returned home. Ben alone came within-door. My father waited in the yard, holding his hat in his hand. I went to him. His hat, the nape of his neck, his shoulders, and his upper back were covered with feces. The stench made me nauseous. I held my nose.

  My father put off his reeking clothes, and Ben washed his whole body. Ben burned the stinking hat and clothes, while my father donned his old black suit. We entered the house together, and my father said, “Mary’s neck did not break when she was hanged. I could not allow her to slowly strangle, so I pulled on her legs with all my might. I heard her neck bone break. Then her bowels gushed all over me.”

  Father’s parish was charged six shillings and eight pence for Mary’s burial. The parishioners protested spending the money on a blaspheming murderer’s burial. My father paid the fee.

  He kept his promise and visited Mary’s four orphaned daughters in the Hospital, wherein he learned that the eldest, Bess, had angered the bonelace teacher by being negligent in her work. The teacher had her flogged at the whipping post. She was given six stripes with a birch rod. My father fetched Ben to carry her home and summoned the barber-surgeon to tend her wounds. She shared the kitchen maid’s bed.

  Upon the next morning, I looked in on Bess, and she said, “Stay a little, I pray you, and speak with me.”

  We spake for the better part of an hour. Amongst the things she said, were, “Methinks Mama loved you more than me, but I forgive you. Daddy loved me best,” and, “Mama said the Devil hath a shrill voice.” Another was this: “If Mama burns amongst the damned, then let it be the same for me. Let me suffer with her forever. Yet if Daddy be saved and in Heaven, I would abide with him in bliss. I loved him best. Well, I leave it to God. I put my trust in Him.”

  The day after, she fell sore sick with a burning fever. Five days afterwards at eventide, she yielded up the ghost.

  • • •

  In July of the year of Christ 1611, my father made his annual journey to Cambridge for Commencement, wherein he passed a week feasting and reveling, in a riot of meat and wine. Then he passed another week catching fire, as he termed it, from praying, fasting, and meditating with other godly Ministers of like belief who had graduated from the University.

  During this time I helped my uncle Roger and his husbandmen make hay upon his farm. He said to me, “Your father has but a week of frolic at Cambridge, but for the rest of the year, he must pray and fast and trudge about the town, this way and that, here to a drab, there to a thief or murderer, like your accursed nurse, that slave of Satan’s! What sort of life is that for a man? Live with me and your aunt and work my farm. Hard work in the open air will purge the torments from your soul.” He belched. “And when my good wife and I die, all that I have will be yours, even unto my black breeches, black stockings, and red cloak.”

  I considered my uncle’s liberal offer. When my father returned from Cambridge, he taught me to keep the accounts he kept of my uncle’s farm and shop. The foregoing year, Roger’s profit was thirty-seven pounds and six shillings. I exulted in my thoughts of the money that might some day accrue to me if I managed his farm and glover’s shop well. So I thus accepted my uncle’s offer.

  My father was sorrowful that I had relinquished his design for me to go to Cambridge and become a Minister. He said, “Make not Mammon your god!”

  “Father,” I said, “your God is my God, and I cry unto Him, ‘Lord, save me!’”

  Uncle Roger hired an attorney to write his will. I was to inherit his farm, glover’s shop, and sundry other things, inclusive of his stockings, breeches, and cloak, upon his and his wife’s death, the stipulation being that I was to be a servant in husbandry who would be
paid two pounds and eight shillings per annum, together with lodging, meat and drink, and livery for as long as my uncle and aunt lived. The Devil bade me wonder how long that would be.

  My aunt Eliza wanted her nephew Tom Foot to inherit the farm. She said to me, “Thou art not a husbandman. You are a scholar. Tom was born to work the land.”

  Said I, “God and uncle Roger have determined otherwise.”

  Even though my father was compelled by Ecclesiastical law to read the recent translation into the common language of the Bible in church, he had given me a volume of the old wholesome Geneva translation of Holy Scripture and bade me to read a chapter therein every evening for so long as I remained upon the farm, lest I forget my Creator in the days of my youth. I did so.

  One evening, I read in Exodus 39:2, “So he made the ephod of gold, blue silk, and purple and scarlet, and fine twined linen.” Now I knew from my father that an ephod was an antique priestly garment without sleeves. The English sentence was not only music to my ears, but it conveyed divers, brightly colored images to my mind’s eye. The English language bewitched me, and I fell in love with my mother tongue.

  • • •

  On the twelfth of September in the year of Christ 1611, I began living and labouring upon my uncle Roger’s farm. I was a student again—but this time, of husbandry and the divers and sundry things which compose the natural world that my father deemed to be ciphers writ by God.

  My first task was to help with the harvest. I have a memory that is surely from the latter part of the month: it is a chilly afternoon. The wind knocks the apples together on the trees, and I gather the fallen fruit to fill my uncle Roger’s pies. He enjoyed baking apple pies; they were very delicious in taste. He did everything well.

  That selfsame autumn, when some of the threshing was done, uncle Roger taught me how to sow his fields with rye and then wheat. I learned to make cider, prune his apple, pear, and cherry trees, and trim his hedges. He taught me to spit on my hands to prevent them from forming blisters.