Charis in the World of Wonders

by Marly Youmans

  “Perhaps your archangel would have friends to rescue us all, and we could swoop about the trees and soar away to a better land.” But I remembered how the greeting of an angel begins with Fear not.

  “See, Charis, here is the end,” Mary said. She swayed and reached to steady herself against a tree.

  “What are you saying?” Her words startled me; how silly that was!

  She squatted in the greenery and last year’s brown leaves. When she looked up at me, I saw with a prick of dismay that streaks of tears had washed clean a path down each cheek.

  “The tail of the string. See?”

  “Ah, I thought you intended something else.” I could have laughed, my assurance returning as quickly as it had flown. “And now we go thirty footsteps to the west. Footsteps the size of Father’s feet. So maybe forty of my footsteps or thereabouts.”

  Mary put her hand on my arm. “That way,” she said, and pointed. Even a little girl in the wilds must know how to mark the sun’s position and be a kind of compass.

  “Good,” I told Mary. “You have a sound sense of direction.”

  Setting my feet carefully, right heel to left toe, left heel to right toe, I walked slowly westward. A needless thing to be so painstaking, I suppose, when the passage was only a count of footsteps, and none of them so very large!

  Mary romped ahead as if she had taken no hurt at all, and soon shouted that she had found the spot. And yet when she wheeled toward me, I was frightened by the whiteness of her face, bled clean of color. I longed for my mother, who would have known what to do, and how much concern the injury warranted.

  “Hush,” I said, but broke from my fussy steps and hastened after her. Yes, the bower place was there. Three years before, my brothers and cousins had transplanted bushes in the rain, and now what had been low scrub appeared as a thicket, tall and leafy, around our root cache. I had often wished that Mary and I were not the only girl cousins in the family, but I did not envy the boys on that day, for it was a hard afternoon of digging and watering, and they were eager for porridge and beer when they trooped home again.

  We would be secure and sheltered. The massed walls of stem and young spring leaf around the cache were not stone or brick or board, but no one could spy us out, once we were tucked inside. Or so was my hope that day. The thought that such packed boscage might appear as a spectacle in our woods crossed my mind and made me feel less easy. Were there other such stands, each shrub fertilized with a dried fish and spiring up so lushly? No. Still, who would suspect that English settlers would make a garden of wild bushes in the midst of a forest?

  A green crack: Mary broke a branch, squeezing inward, and I begged her to creep and dawdle, treading more carefully.

  “We don’t want to gift the Indians with a single token that people were here. They are quick to mark hints and clues in the woods. We want to be secret. We want to be shielded.”

  I tore away the remainder of the branch and plucked up a few leaves that had drifted to the ground. “Slow, slow.”

  The twigs lashed at her face, but Mary bent and wormed inward, vanishing from my sight. I had more trouble than she, the branches so limber and closely spaced that they bowed under me and sprang back with sounds of snapping, so that I feared leaving legible signposts to any Indian roving that way. But I burst through, tumbling onto the cache. It had not been touched by us since the plentiful harvest in the prior fall, and new green now masked the surface. Mary already lay at full length on the frail plants, arms out, staring up at the trees and sky.

  “Charis—”

  “Shhh,” I said, holding up a finger. “Just a whisper from now on.”

  Tears glazed her eyes, but she nodded. “I will. Like a game. I hoped Tom would be here. When will Mother and Father and the others come?”

  “Like a game, yes. I cannot tell when they will be here. But let’s see what is in the blanket. Otherwise we will have to burrow in the cache like woodchucks and gnaw on raw, dirty roots.”

  “We can make a bed.” Mary patted the cloth. “I could sleep now. Thirsty, and my head—”

  “Food will help. Look, here’s ashcakes. The purple kind made of acorn meal and dried blueberries. And here’s a skin bag—maybe Aunt Mercy’s mincemeat? You like venison and chokecherries, so that’s good.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Not hungry? How can that be?” I reached for something else to entice her. “Maybe a bottle of beer?” The clay bottle had a wax stopper that I broke with a stick. I sniffed the contents, drank, and passed it to Mary.

  “Aunt Hannah’s blackberry cordial,” I told her.

  She made a face but drank thirstily anyway.

  “We can scoop water from the stream when the bottle is empty. It’s not far.”

  Ashcake might never have been so welcome as it was to me, but the bag turned out to hold strips of venison, which proved tough. Have you seen beavers chisel and chop at a tree with their front teeth, intent on damming a brook, making a pond, and fashioning themselves a tidy new lodge? That is precisely how I gnawed the venison—just so determined.

  If bound for some hunting feast or country banquet out-of-doors, as in family stories about England our mother would sometimes tell, I would have judged that the manner in which she had handled the packing was comical. Clearly she was in a dire hurry. She had snatched up my old sampler to wrap the bread. I inspected the long cloth with its row after row of neat patterns. The stitches had not always been so tidy, but Mother made me work and re-work the bands until they were as nigh-perfect as my fingers could make.

  In truth, the sampler was a folly in the wilderness, as strange as sons poring over Greek and Latin with my father. Mary rested her hand on the linen, where each band showed off mastery of different stitches: rococo, rice, tent, stem, split, chain. . . . Her fingers plucked at the bands of stars, flowers, miniature trees, acorns, and love knots, all worked in silks. “Colors,” she whispered.

  I moved my finger across the stitched landscape, naming the dyes one by one to please her: indigo blue, madder rose, Kendal green, russet, and chamomile yellow.

  The hues were well enough, but what need did we settlers have for fancy stitches or fine couching? Here in our bower, the sampler was even more out of place, as unaccountable and downright peculiar as one of Ezekiel’s chrysolite wheels within wheels, rimmed with eyes. But that it pleased my sister, despite her pain, was perhaps enough. She rested her hand on mine as I slid a finger over my name, the date, the verse by Mistress Bradstreet at the foot. Softly I read the words to Mary:

  My hungry soul He filled with good,

  He in His bottle put my tears,

  My smarting wounds washed in His blood,

  And banished thence my doubts and fears.

  Why had Mother sent me off into the woods with a sampler?

  “We should have washed. And you must eat something,” I said.

  My sister bit down, yanking at a strip of venison, and set it aside.

  “Sleepy,” she said. “My head beats.”

  She looked bruised under the eyes, and I wondered what more I should do for her. How serious was a head that pounded? Worry stayed with me, sometimes rising until I had to press it down, fearful that I might frighten Mary. Sleep might mend her. But surely she should have food. When she closed her eyes, I could not bear it and tapped her gently on the face until she opened them again.

  “Let’s go through the rest and spread out the blanket,” I proposed. “Maybe there’s more to eat.”

  Mary was pleased to find a doll in the blanket sling, and let me place it in her arms. The little figure was unfinished, made of linen and a few scraps with hair from combings, mine and Mary’s and even our mother, who already had threads of silver and white in her gold. A needle was tucked into the face, connected by a thread to a silk eyebrow, still unfinished. Though the doll lacked eyes and nose and mouth, Mary had no trouble loving it and whispering a secret into invisible ears.

  The blanket held scissors, a shar
p knife, a coif embroidered with the outlines of tiny white leaves, my gown dyed with elderberries, spare woolen stockings for both of us, a shift for Mary, and a paper sack of sugared almonds that Mother must have been saving for some special occasion.

  “Oh!” Tears came into Mary’s eyes again as she sucked on an almond.

  The unexpected delicacy made us both sad.

  “You’ll see Mother by morning,” I promised.

  “And Tom and Father and my brothers?”

  “Yes, and the others, too.”

  Mary slept without eating more, once vomiting unexpectedly, and I had some trouble waking her later on when I wished her to take more nourishment. For perhaps half an hour in the late afternoon, I managed to keep her from sleep, though she ate nothing. Her face matched the little doll for pallor, and she would only let me lift her into a half-seated position. Both of us drank a good deal of the cordial, with the result that we were drowsy. We curled on the blanket, watched as the occasional bird crossed the sky, and talked in a whisper of the day, of our hopes that Mother and Father and the others would come to us soon.

  “This is our green room, and that is our blue sky ceiling, and we are snug inside,” I said, though worry stayed ever with me, and the memory of my sister’s hand slipping from mine kept recurring to me like an ill dream.

  “Our green room, our blue,” Mary said sleepily. Tears shone in her eyes. I knew she dreaded the coming dark—as I did—in the forest. Our people have always feared such places, for only God is safe in a wild realm where the Devil stamps and roars, tormenting and tempting all of moral kind luckless enough to lose the way.

  “My head,” she whispered. She wept a little but seemed too weary even for that effort.

  The sun seemed careworn, too, blinking through the trees, and before the sunset began to dye the world to rose madder, we were both drenched in sleep, I curled around Mary, and Mary curled around the faceless doll.

  Once the war-noise of a mosquito woke me in the night, my mouth parched, my dress dank, and Mary’s face close to my own. The colorful sun-dreams of day’s end must have been long chased away by the dark. My sister’s breath was labored and harsh, and I thought she must still be in misery, even in sleep. I rolled over and stared up at the stars, and though I could smell a faint odor of smoke in the air, they were unobscured by fire or clouds, and my eyes were dazzled.

  “Lord Christ,” I whispered, the fright slamming into me that my mother and father and all my family were slain, nevermore in this life to walk the earth. The stars shone on, careless of me, and never gave a sign of comfort or greeting, though once I had told Mary that they were the travel-fires of angels, where they toasted fine Boston bread, as tender and good as bride cakes.

  My brother Joseph had reproved me for saying it, and now I thought that he and John and Isaac and all my kin could scold me ten times a day for the rest of my life, and yet I would still be full of joy that they were mine and I theirs, with no mischance come upon us.

  Mary sighed, trembling, and turned away from me on the blanket.

  I stared into the dark and bright of the sky, unable to consider the next day and what I must do. Once I glimpsed the flick of a falling star that lashed me with portent-fears. My head, dense and afflicted with pangs, longed for sleep. Surely we had taken far too much of the cordial. At last, the ground and the shrubs seemed to change place with the sky and stars, so that I pitched headfirst into a sleep that grew brighter and brighter until I vanished into light.

  I knew nothing but the depths of sleep until drops of dew rolled from leaves and splashed onto my face the next morning. The world was blurred through that cold water. Shivering lightly, I rubbed away the dew and saw the green stand of shrubs and the tint of dawn chinking their stems.

  Like a great stroke of light that slams across the horizon, the whole memory of the day before flashed into my mind.

  I sat up, pressing one hand against the runaway beat of my heart.

  Mary was still asleep, her aspect mysterious and closed. A dried spill of vomit caked one cheek.

  Only when I attempted to wake her did I realize that something new was the matter. She made no answer and did not open her eyes and slap at me, as she often did when I roused her.

  Kneeling, I noticed that one ear and a portion of the linen cap close by were soaked with clear fluid. A strange purpling like a bruise had bloomed behind the ear and ran down her neck, though I was certain the color had not been there on the day before.

  I shook her, called her name without fearing alien warriors, lurking and spying in the brush. “Mary, Mary, Mary—wake!”

  I clutched her to me, rocked her in my arms, moaned to the green walls and the blue sky.

  How strange to be like someone in a parable! And this is how it seemed: once there was a maiden who rose to find that her sister could not be wakened. And no one could ever rouse her again, never again, never. And why it happened or what it meant, the girl never knew, though someone knew. But God did not tell her, though something seemed to quiver in the leaves and utter meanings that she could not understand. To that young woman, it appeared terrible to be alone with the dead, and tragic that out there, Indians and settlers roamed the world when now her sister would not stir and walk with her. It was dreadful, impossible that a cur dog would chase a squirrel on some Massachusetts village green, or that some scraggy cat would pounce on a bit of leaf teased by the wind, and yet this child would not rise, would not speak, would not breathe. How could so much of the world shine and so many drink at the air with pleasure when Mary lay so still?

  It is our common human blight, and yet for me nothing in that awakening was common.

  Could the blow to her head have been so much worse than it seemed? It had alarmed me, but I had not thought that it could destroy her life. And yet now I must believe that she was dead. Dear God! I had not loved and minded her well enough, and so had allowed rugged stone to strike against her tender skull.

  “Mary.”

  What ailed me that I worked for such a long time at combing her hair with my fingers and tucking the curls into her child’s coif, scrubbing at her cheek and ear with leaves, and straightening her limbs and arranging her so that she looked comfortable? For she would no longer need to be made content on the earth. But we mortals cannot help striving to do some good to another when it is far too late, with those we love stricken dead, and so I could not help smoothing Mary’s dress and dropping tears onto her face as I toyed with her hair. I plucked up the doll and held it against me for comfort, though I was far too old for such plaything-love. The little creature had suffered along with Mary, and now a single drop of blood stained the linen face. There would never be call to finish embroidering the features.

  And all that time with Mary and the doll made of scraps and hair, I did not brood on the house or my mother and father and the boys, or my aunts and uncles and cousins. I did not remember them or Onesimus and Blue Jonas but thought of myself, alone, and of Mary, who would never again have to be afraid of what lurks and schemes in the forest. I nearly envied her peacefulness. Now she was truly a Bible—lily of the field who would neither spin nor grow weary.

  I prayed that God would have mercy on her now and on the Day of Judgment, and that even if some spoke against her, the divine energies of making and re-making would remember her still. A conviction, golden and blessed, of her essential goodness and harmlessness came over me and felt intense and sweet so that I forgot everything and seemed to float, transparent, in a stream of light that flowed around and through me.

  But every gleamy instant on a mountaintop must be followed by a return to the shadows of the valley, where someone in anguish or lost in madness is always howling.

  My head throbbed; I wanted water but sipped more of the cordial, which did not please me as a morning drink. For some minutes I lay down in a stupor beside my sister on the low, crushed plants that smelled of springtime and mint, until at last I began again to come to my senses and cry a little and sit u
p.

  “Mary,” I said, and then was silent, thinking how King Death had come while I slept and led away my sister. And was I half a murderer for not saving her? That loss would haunt me, I felt certain.

  But the sun had swung further into the sky than I liked. I wanted to leave. Our green shelter had been partially riven by our passage and was no more an unbroken secret, and I could not bide longer for those who might never come. I needed to know. Hastily I drank the remaining cordial (now detestable to me), ate frugally of the ashcake, and packed the remains of bread and venison, wrapping them in the sampler as my mother had done. The scissors and knife I swaddled in the spare coif, for they were all I had to serve as weapons. If I must, I would wield them as best I could. I smoothed the clothes with my hand and made a lodging for them as well. Mary would not need the shift and spare stockings, and who knows what need I would have before the day was out? They might somehow prove useful, though far too small to be worn by me. How could I know what might be important? Much might have been damaged in the attack. Bandages might be needed.

  I put one of the sugared nuts in my mouth and stowed the rest. I shut my eyes, sucking on the sweet paradise of the almond. My tears were for Mary, who had flown beyond all earthly pleasures. It was not what I had meant when longing for her angel and a better world. And I had promised she would see all our kin this morning!

  I bent to hoist the blanket sling. The bundle made an unwieldy burden, but I would not have to bear the weight of my sister—only the heavy thought that I might have cared for her better and saved her from dashing against the rocks.

  I tied the blanket about me, shoulder to hip, and knelt to bid Mary my farewell.

  “They will come,” I promised what remained of her; “Father and Blue Jonas and Onesimus will come back and fetch you and take you home properly. Someone will be here.” But I thought of the ancient injunction, Let the dead bury the dead, and was afraid.

  The tears would rise from their fount at such words, but I wiped them away, sure that I had no space for mourning.