by Marge Piercy
The battle came the second day, when she introduced the resolutions she had drawn up. Even Lucretia did not support her call for female suffrage, convinced she was asking too much, but the ex-slave Frederick Douglass rose to support votes for women. It was not the first time she had heard him speak and been impressed, but she was moved by his aid. Women and some men were looking to her as a leader—she who was the youngest woman who had spoken yesterday or today, she who her husband had feared would humiliate him by making a fool of herself. She made several speeches—something she had never done before—and began to enjoy it. She observed that when she spoke, people listened and appeared to be moved. Her brain had not died, as she had sometimes feared, shut up in a rickety house with a maidservant who could scarcely speak English and three little children, reciting nursery rhymes and boiling laundry and cooking puddings.
When she went home that night, she looked at herself in the mirror in her bedroom, meeting her eyes with a new bold confidence. She could not say she looked forward to the letdown that would come tomorrow when once again she was only a housewife with hampers of dirty linens, with bread and pies to bake and the boys to take berry-picking as she had promised. Then would come pies in the heat of the sweltering kitchen, stirring and stirring the preserves and jams that must be put up and the fruit for later pies. She would be back to the endless drudgery of the house, but she had tasted something else—a hint of freedom, of largeness of vision and vistas, of a world that included a public role as well as private unpaid work. Henry had called her just a small-town housewife, but she had proved to herself and an audience of women and men that she was more than that.
FIFTEEN
1854
AT TEN, TONY WAS big for his age. He could work as hard as his next older brother during haying season, and he was responsible for slopping the pigs, milking the cows and leading them to pasture and back. He helped his mother with the vegetable garden, carrying water, pouring manure tea on growing plants. Sometimes he was sent to take eggs warm from under the chickens, but usually his next younger brother was given that task. His father said that soon he’d drive the team and plow. Father was a strict taskmaster who never hesitated to take a strap or a stick to a lazy or disobedient child.
That fall Father said he would take him along hunting. They had little time for hunting during the most active season of the farm, but in the fall his father would often put his rifle on his shoulder and go shooting for birds or rabbits, accompanied by Samuel, the oldest boy. At times Father would travel with other farmers to hunt deer in the higher hills about two hours riding to the north in the buckboard so they could carry carcasses back, roughly butchered in the woods where the deer fell. Anthony worked to become a good marksman to please his father. Since he was nine, he had been trapping rabbits in a snare. At first he felt sorry for them, with their shiny eyes like black buttons and their soft fur, but Samuel said they were varmints who ate vegetables. Samuel said the more they struggled, the tighter grew the noose, like sinners in the hands of Satan—a phrase their preacher used that stuck in Tony’s mind like a burr.
The soil of their farm was good, Father said. Generations of farmers had piled up stones for fences so that only a few heaved out every winter, humping from the soil like skulls rising from below. Sometimes local boys told each other scary stories about headless horsemen, bogeymen and witches. But when the evangelical preacher came that summer, his sermon was scarier, because hell was real and, as the preacher said, every one of them was in danger at all times of God’s wrath raining down on them like on Sodom and Gomorrah in fire and brimstone. The true way was narrow; the way to sin and damnation, wide and heavily traveled.
His mother gripped his hand tight in the hard pew when she was not joining her hands together in prayer. His father listened and nodded and prayed when everyone did and sang the hymns loud and off-key. But his mother listened with a fervor that seemed to burn through her thin body. Her eyes would shine when she spoke of God at prayers every morning and night or when she beat him because he was wicked and broke the eggs he was carrying or used a bad word he did not know the meaning of, but repeated because another boy had said it. When she went to revivals, sometimes the spirit of God would shake her from head to foot until her light bones seemed to rattle. She had a true carrying voice that could sing the hymns loud and clear above all the people around them, as if only she were singing for God to hear. Tony was sure God would listen to her. He adored his mother. He feared his father, but his mother was his refuge.
The local Congregational church was plain white clapboard with no frippery, no stained glass windows. The Comstocks sat up front in the sixth row, because they were prosperous farmers, among the best in the township. Anthony was proud of his parents, his mother so pious and virtuous, his father hardworking and a good farmer recognized by all. The preacher was a short stout man with a red face and a shock of white hair, but when he launched into his sermons, he seemed a giant to Tony, who cowered before the righteous wrath of the Lord as delivered by his servant, his vessel, the Reverend Cole.
“It is the lust of the mind and the body of which you must beware. It is through lust that Eve brought sin into the world, it is through lust that Eve seduced Adam into evil and brought death into the world. Woe unto the woman who does not wrap herself in modesty and lower her eyes and go obediently under the yoke her Maker has placed on her and who refuses to give that compliance to God and to her husband which is her only virtue.
“Beware, beware of the fires of lust lest they burn your soul from you. Far hotter than the fires of lust are the fires of hell, where sinners burn eternally, while the flames lick the flesh from their bones, while their bones themselves blacken with flames, while their fat drips snapping from their bodies into the fire. Yet, O sinners, their flesh is never consumed but miraculously renewed to burn yet again and again and again, for God does not forgive the sins of the filthy body and filthy mind!
“None of us is free from evil, for we are born of woman. Evil can corrupt a child of five as easily as a man of forty. A man says to himself, it doesn’t matter if I read this pamphlet about a woman’s body. It can’t do any harm to have another glass of whiskey with my friends in the saloon. What harm is there in dancing with neighbors, boys and girls together, to the saw of a fiddler? What harm is it to read a French book, or to go to the theater where half-naked women prance onstage and the word ‘love’ is bandied about—having nothing to do with the virtuous respectful love a woman bears her husband or with the love we all owe to our Maker. Well, my children, the harm is instantaneous and forever, for it is the harm of damnation. It is the harm of losing your soul for the sake of going to a circus and seeing elephants and tigers. It is the harm of losing your soul for all eternity for the sake of reading something you would be better off never setting your eyes upon. It is the harm of Judgment Day, when God shall save a few and damn the multitudes for the careless sins of their youth, their maturity and their old age. You are never too young nor ever too old to sin, and the price is high, men and women before me today, the price is terrifyingly high and it never stops. You will burn through eternity. Think how it hurts when you put your hand accidentally in the fire. Now imagine that not for a minute, not for an hour, not for a day, not for a week, not for a month, not for a year, not for a decade—but forever and ever and ever, that scorching pain you cannot stand, but you will stand it and you will stand it for all eternity. That is what awaits the sinner. Never forget hell’s fire for a moment, because a moment is all it takes to damn yourself to that fire forever and ever.”
Tony woke screaming that night and the next and the next, seeing devils around him grinning with big horns like bucks and pushing him into the fire. His father beat him; then his mother tucked him in. “You must feel you have been wicked, my Tony, to carry on so about the Word of God.”
“I don’t mean to be wicked, Mother. I want to be good.”
“You must work hard, you must be vigilant to keep yourself p
ure. Then God will love you, and your purity will let you escape the Devil’s snares.” His mother kissed him on the brow and left him. He learned not to cry out when he had nightmares, for they went on tormenting him. If he did not cry, then Father would not punish him for waking the household and Mother would not worry that his thoughts were impure.
God tried him and the household sorely that August, for his mother came down with malaria. It had been a damp summer and hay rotted in the field. The corn had fungus. She seemed to fight the fever off; then it came back worse. She lay in her bed burning up, like the sinners the Reverend Cole had described, then she began to shake with cold. Her teeth chattered as she lay wrapped in a feather quilt she had made herself. She could not eat. At the end of ten days of the second siege, she died, with a neighbor at her side. All the older boys including Tony were out harvesting the field corn for the animals, the feed that would be stored in their tall silo. A neighbor woman came waving her kerchief, telling them they must come. They all ran toward the house, the boys, while their father unhooked the horse and rode back. His father got there in time to close her eyes. When the boys arrived panting, their mother was dead.
Tony missed her in the morning when he got up and there was no breakfast made, but the two eldest boys must make porridge for everybody and quick bread or griddle cakes. His older brother complained that they were doing women’s work and must get a girl to come in. But their father said that would tempt the boys into wrongdoing, and besides, they could not afford it. The harvest had gone badly.
The next spring his brother Eben was killed, kicked and trampled by a horse that had bolted. His father seemed to lose heart. He looked different. More rumpled, grayer, thinner. Gradually the farm disintegrated around them. Still Anthony was able to go on from the local school to a church academy secondary school. There he was no longer son of one of the most prosperous farmers, but a poor boy whom the better-off looked down upon and who had to do chores to earn his keep. Every morning he rose before dawn to chop wood and stoke the stoves. Because he was big for his age and strong, if furniture needed to be hauled up or down or moved around, if trunks had to be carried to the dormitory and then to the trunk room, if a student was going home and his effects must be carried downstairs, there was Anthony the muscle, Anthony the poor boy who must do every job and do it willingly. Now there was no one to hold him and call him Tony and pray over him when she tucked him in. He was Anthony now, half an orphan.
He would remember when he was lying in his cot at night how life had been while his mother lived. His mother had been an angel, a heroine of virtue and temperance, one of the souls whom the Lord prized. She was in heaven as surely as sinners were roasting in hell. The Lord acted in mysterious ways, the Reverend Macdonald, who was headmaster, said frequently. The Lord had taken her for his own reasons, which Anthony would never understand and could not presume to judge, or he would be a sinner. But secretly at night, sometimes he almost wept and only kept himself from tears by biting hard on his lip, on the inside of his cheeks until they bled. He missed her terribly She had been the only tenderness in his life, for his father was a stern taskmaster who put the work of the farm before anything on earth or in heaven. But his mother had loved him, he was sure of that, and he had loved her. Someday when he was grown and a successful man, he would marry a woman just like his mother. He would have sons and daughters and raise them in righteousness. But he would not be a farmer. No. He had wheedled his way into the secondary school because he was not going to spend his life wading in mud, dealing with sick cows and mad horses and stubborn chickens, shoveling manure, victimized by wind and hail and too much rain and drought and grasshoppers and vermin. His father had lost half his farm and was well on the way to losing the second half. The elder Comstock had been speculating to recoup his fortune, buying short, buying on margin; then he lost that money too.
No, Anthony would work at a desk or in a shop or in a bank or something of the sort. Perhaps he would apprentice himself to a lawyer. He had no interest in medicine, but the law seemed to him something almost as fine as religion. His mother, he knew, would have liked him to be a preacher, but he had no gift for oratory. He had a strong harsh voice, so that people cringed when he sang. He remembered his mother’s clear voice rising like a bird from the congregation in their plain church. The chapel in this school was not plain. Their beds were hard, the rooms drafty, the books battered, the teachers careworn and often bored, but the chapel was almost luxurious. Some alumnus had given stained glass windows with figures of the prophets. The chapel even had an organ. The mathematics teacher played it clumsily, but it made a great loud sound that resonated up through the thin soles of his much-mended boots. He was not sure he approved of stained glass and walnut paneling, but it did show that one alumnus of this dreary school had made good. He was determined to make good himself, to do his duty but also to flourish.
The Reverend Macdonald could preach up a storm. He was aware he was teaching a school of boys verging on adolescence or well into it, and he spoke a great deal about the volcano of lust that could destroy a boy as well as a man and bring ruin and shame upon his family.
The passions of unregulated human nature, the preacher said, would burn through a family like a fire through a frame structure in dry windy weather and leave nothing behind but ashes and shame. Only true Christian marriage could atone for the sins of Adam and Eve, could prevent the lapse into our animal nature, could fulfill the only true purpose of the coming together of husband and wife—the production of offspring, to be fruitful and multiply as the Lord had commanded. Any other use for the conjugal bed was profane and harlotry, said the preacher, and Anthony felt those words engrave themselves upon his heart. Abominations abounded in the town around them and in the great cities of the land. Satan walked those streets, Satan called to boys and to men and to women too to cast aside their morality and go rolling in the mud of lust. That phrase particularly struck Anthony, for growing up on a working farm, he had a great deal of experience with mud. It was something he had more knowledge of than he had ever desired or wished to improve upon. Enough with mud and manure and rutting animals. The bodily part of man, said the Reverend Macdonald in a loud ringing voice, was that part of man belonging to Satan. It must be disciplined like a wicked child. Spare the rod and spoil the child. They used the rod a great deal in this school. Also a great stick with which the mathematics teacher would rap their knuckles or switch them across the buttocks over his desk. Anthony had been switched only once, when he had first come to the school and did not yet grasp all the rules. It would never happen again. He walked a narrow path, a poor boy here on sufferance, and made himself a good student who memorized everything stuck in front of him. There was a temperance meeting at the school as well as in town, and Anthony signed the pledge. Rum was of the devil. It corrupted men and wasted their goods.
Anthony was walking with the Reverend Macdonald back from the inn where the stagecoach stopped. They had just put a student on it, for at thirteen he still wet his bed and was suspected of abusing himself. He was being expelled in disgrace. He had sniveled all the way to the coach while Anthony struggled under the weight of his huge valise and the reverend puffed along with the boy gripped by the shoulder.
While the coach was loading, the reverend and Anthony sat on a bench to make sure the boy went off safely. A lady was mounting and she pulled up her heavy skirts to clamber in as the coach swayed. Anthony turned his face away so as not to see her nether limb, but he noticed out of the corner of his eye that the Reverend Macdonald did not avert his gaze but watched until she was seated inside. After the coach had left, he broached the matter. “Reverend, sir, you have said that we should avert our eyes when a lady inadvertently shows ankle or other distressing areas of her limbs. But you did not turn away, sir.”
Macdonald looked annoyed. His face grew redder than usual, but his voice was mild. “I am a soldier of the Lord, boy. When you are enlisted in the army of God, you do not flee temptati
on but encounter it manfully. You may even test your resolve by permitting yourself to observe sin. The master may do what the apprentice should not attempt.”
“I understand, Reverend.” He was fascinated. He would enlist in the army of the Lord and he too would be strong and virtuous enough to look upon sin without wavering from his path of righteousness. There was something extraordinarily appealing and powerful-feeling in that idea.
He wrote home regularly, dutifully. Once upon a time he had automatically admired his father. His father was the best farmer, the most righteous man. But he no longer admired him, although he must remember the Fifth Commandment to honor his father—as best he could. After the death of his mother and his brother, his father allowed weakness to overcome him. He no longer behaved as the standard-bearer of the Lord, but wallowed in misfortune. In his heart Anthony no longer felt more than a dutiful love that he must bear a father who had begotten him. Then his father wrote that he had a business opportunity in England and was sailing the next fortnight. Anthony did not hear from him for three months. A brief note came. His father said he was doing well enough. He was working for a merchant in grain.
There was no farm to return to. His family was scattered. Anthony had nothing to call a home. Once he had made his fortune, he would collect his family and help them; until then, he would go his way and they would make what way they could. He pitied his youngest brother Abel, who had had the least time with their angelic mother and who was left to try to find the Lord and his own path of righteousness.
The following November, a letter came from his father saying that he had remarried, a pious widow whose merchant husband had left her a business to run. He did not invite any of his children to join him. Anthony prayed often by his cot although the other boys thought him overly pious. He prayed for his father’s soul, remarried across the sea and forgetting his old family, and he prayed for each of his living brothers. But above all he prayed for little Abel, who now was only six but without guidance to avoid sin and damnation, and for his own soul, that he might do his duty and also make his way in the world. Anthony had no one, no one except the Lord, so he loved him and worshipped him with all the fervor of his growing adolescent body. If he worked hard and stayed pure, the Lord would provide.