Charis in the World of Wonders

by Marly Youmans

  “Laldrum? She was unwell,” Phoebe protested.

  “Yes, indeed,” I said.

  “She was plainly upset in her mind, you mean,” Bel said, and held up an apron to examine the neck. “And she made a mighty silly nazzle of herself in full view of the congregation, many of whom stood around gaping at her and so got a long stare at some buffle-headed nonsense.”

  “Nazzle is harsh for someone taken by a fit,” Phoebe said.

  “There are fits, it is true,” Bel said, “but there are such things as bursts of ill temper.”

  “Remember that she had to spend some no-doubt harrowing hours with Mr. Barnard, going over the error of her manners,” I said. “And she could have tittle-tattled on you, and said that you had played at sieve-and-scissors, but she did not. You would have had to listen to his harangue as well. Is that not kind?”

  Bel let out a low groan.

  “Only because he was so busy talking about the powers of the invisible world that he forgot that it takes two to play at sieve-and-scissors. He talked her right into the ground, which is something amazing.”

  “Unlike some, I am fond of old Mr. Dane,” Phoebe said. “He never alarms me the way Mr. Barnard can. But I believe either one would have scoured and scolded you for fortune-telling.”

  “I suppose,” Bel said. She set down the apron and stared absently at the fire.

  “But all the same, some of the Wardwells do tell fortunes,” Phoebe said. “When they took to reading lines from palms in front of me, I tried to say to Goodman Wardwell and his son that the future belongs to God, but they did not pay any mind. People do not listen when you say what they do not care to hear.”

  In response, Bel yawned and stood up, turning her back to the flames.

  “Once old Samuel Wardwell caught up my hand and told me that I would not live long,” Phoebe added. “But who does?”

  “Methuselah,” said Bel.

  “I doubt our years are written in the palms of our hands,” I said.

  “And I also. I scrubbed my hand afterward.” She leaned forward. “He made me uneasy, and I was a long time forgetting what he said. And now I have remembered it again.”

  Bel scuffed her shoe back and forth on the floor. “I’m no good for sewing any longer. There is a limit to my patience, and that verge has been reached. The work will be all niffle-naffle from here on if I try. Let’s show off the secret place,” she said.

  “But we’ve hardly done enough work, surely,” I said, glancing up.

  “We can finish the clothes later,” Bel proposed, “or take them with us. Or come again another day.” Phoebe Wardwell hesitated.

  “Please! You promised,” Bel said. She turned toward me, lowering her voice as if someone might overhear. “And it is a true secret, for the Wardwells did not know when they possessed the house. But now you will know, and the secret will be four.”

  “Six,” Phoebe said. “The three of us and Thomas Wardwell and the two dead Lovejoys, who tell no one. I meant to share the story with Mr. Dane when he visited after the wedding but clean failed to remember. But now I am in the habit of keeping the secret—it is our own to possess or to give away where we will.”

  “I know nothing about what you are saying,” I said. “I beg you, do not consider me. Though I am safe with a secret, if it be not evil.”

  Indeed, I thought, my mind is as charged with secrets as a paper cartridge packed with grains of powder. Falmouth had changed me, so that my mind was always double, quietly considering another’s words while my thoughts often protested.

  “Right, then,” Phoebe said. “Though I am a bit afraid of a fall.”

  She struggled a little in rising, and I reached for her hand, hauling her upward until she found her footing.

  “ ’Tis dirty, you know, where we must travel,” she told me.

  I did not answer, not having the least conception what she meant.

  “We can just hold our cloaks close,” Bel said. “And if they are dirtied, well, we can brush them by the fire.”

  I stared at her. “I have no line with which to plumb your—”

  “A surprise,” Bel broke in. “You know what a surprise is.”

  “Often it is something terrible.”

  “Not like that,” she assured me.

  “You must put on your outer clothes,” Phoebe Wardwell told me. “As much to protect your gown as for the cold.”

  She lit a straw in the fire and then a candle, choosing a good-sized stub of tallow and stabbing it onto the metal teeth of a battered lantern.

  “A candle? But ‘tis daylight.”

  No one answered my wonderment. I stood up, in greater mystery than when they had first started talking about the secret place. We fastened our cloaks as though leaving, yet we were not leaving. What was this? Bel headed out of the room and toward the lean-to room at the back of the house. In truth, I had lost any love of surprise long ago and would have preferred to sit sewing by the fire over being teased by a riddle.

  The place was odd. First, the wrongly set chimbley, and now a strange narrow way that ran along one side. . .

  In the rear of the passage, Phoebe shoved away an old traveling chest that must have come with someone’s grandparents from England and knelt down, stroking the floor with her fingers. “Just here,” she said.

  At once she jerked her arm upward, lifting a large square of boards to expose darkness and the slats of a ladder going down.

  “A root cellar? What is so wondrous about a cellar? Though it is cleverly disguised,” I said.

  Nevertheless, I knelt down with the others and gazed as Phoebe Wardwell lowered the candle lantern into the opening. The light shone golden and amber through the thin horn panes, shifting and sliding on the dirt walls below.

  Strange to smell in the winter, a faint odor of earth met my nose. A wave of warmer air washed against our faces. By the flicker of candlelight, I saw that the darkness of the soil gave way to a paler brown, the walls shored up here and there with logs and branches.

  I still did not understand why we had come here, or why Bel wanted me to see the Wardwell cellar.

  “It’s not a root cellar,” Bel said.

  “What then?”

  Phoebe Wardwell eased herself to a sitting position and let her legs dangle in the opening as she explained. “Thomas Wardwell purchased our house from John Lovejoy, heir to his uncle’s estate. The uncle, Goodman Silas Lovejoy, was handy and constructed most of the house himself. I have heard that a traveling stonemason built the bigger of the chimbleys. The house stood all alone, though since that year the other houses have grown braver and crept out this way, until we almost can be said to have neighbors.”

  “It is still lonely,” Bel said. “I wish you were nearer.”

  “Silas Lovejoy had a just fear of Indians because one day he left home to go to a town meeting, and when he came home again, his wife and child had been clubbed, and most of the right-hand side of the house was burned, both the main part and the lean-to at back. So it is only half a house now.”

  “What a terrible day,” I said.

  Again Phoebe Wardwell reached over to me and placed her hand on mine.

  “Many people urged him to abandon the house or pick it to pieces and move to town,” she said. “He was still a young man and might marry again. But he did not. He patched the house, leaving the center chimney nearly half outside and adding another one in what was left of the lean-to. A thin piece of parlor and of another room in the lean-to was left over. He tore down the parlor wall, but he kept the useless wall in the lean-to. Between the outer wall and a lean-to wall was a narrow space that became storage and also served as a passageway from the front to the back.”

  “How odd,” I said. “So he just put an outer wall on the remains?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And he hid the trapdoor here in the passage. Evidently he began digging sometime in that first year because the old people remember when Lovejoy’s Hillock began to be a landmark, and it was not l
ong till it rose so high than no one passing could ignore it.”

  “You mean that bump in the landscape? Near the hedge? Bel Dane, you told me that it was nothing! Is that what happened to the dirt? But what is the meaning of it?” I was still confused, still thinking of what was below us as a small cellarage.

  “You will find out,” Bel said. She looked at Phoebe and said, “Swing up your legs and let me go first. Then I can help you.”

  As soon as the pregnant woman did so, Bel picked up the lantern and lowered herself into the gap. I could hear her shoes scraping on the rungs.

  I was worried for Phoebe Wardwell. “Is this safe for you?”

  But Phoebe clambered after her, latching on to the lip of the hole before slowly vanishing rung by rung into the darkness. I marveled that she managed so well, and not as though she carried a burden. She must have been on the ladder many times before.

  Soon Phoebe stood under the trapdoor and waved the lantern and a broom of twigs at me.

  “Come on,” Bel called. “Careful with your cloak, or it will catch on a handhold.”

  “I see why you told me to wear my old green gown.” I had on the dress that Nabby had patched with bands of dull red cloth, back in Haverhill. It was the one Goody Holt approved.

  Clearly the two friends were familiar with what lay below, but I was not. I lay on my belly and slowly slid my legs down until my foot found a slat of wood. Hanging from the edge, I felt about for something to grip. Bel brought the lantern closer, and I grabbed for a spike projecting from the dirt wall. Hand over hand, step by step, I climbed downward, and then gazed up at the square of light glimmering overhead. “The door looks so strange from below, as if in another world,” I said.

  “Like a grave down here,” Bel said, her voice cheerful, “and we glancing back at the light of the lost life.”

  “Do not be dour,” Phoebe said. “It is not a bit that way.”

  But I found, in fact, a gloomy place not so different from a grave. The others moved off, and I followed the light that shuffled back and forth on the ceiling. Silas Lovejoy had gone to a deal of trouble to shore up his work, I thought, for everywhere were logs and large branches embedded in the walls, dark veins passing through the clay and offering their support. I fancied they must miss having the sun and moon and stars in their arms.

  Strange, this butchered and botched house. And eccentric Goodman Lovejoy with his secret.

  Slowly we traveled away from the patch of light behind us. The atmosphere grew darker. I reached for Phoebe Wardwell’s cloak, and she grasped my hand.

  “ ’Tis a tunnel,” I said in astonishment. “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see,” Bel called.

  “We must have journeyed some forty footsteps when I glimpsed a thin scratch of light in the darkness.”

  “There it is!” Phoebe let go of my fingers as the passage narrowed and rose. A ramp of packed soil led us toward the streak of daylight.

  “Now thrust,” Phoebe Wardwell said, and knocked the broom handle against wood to show where. “Push, push, push!”

  We were crowded together, bent under the close ceiling of dirt and timbers, but we shoved mightily until a door over our heads budged—Bel threw open the wooden panel with one giant heave.

  Having scrabbled forward on our hands and knees, we now tumbled out-of-doors. I tripped on the broom and lay on the ground in the caul of my cloak, looking up at the sky as though I had never seen such snow-laden clouds before. Rolling over, I laughed to see the others flopped in the snow. I got onto my knees, reaching to help Phoebe Wardwell with both hands, but she was not ready.

  She cradled her belly with both arms, smiling blissfully at the sky.

  I hunched back down, wrapping my cloak around me and waiting for her to feel able to rise. For a moment, I feared that her time of trouble had come. “Does he kick and tussle, your babe?”

  She nodded. “He—or she—wants to jump headfirst into the world, I believe. He clenches together and opens up like a thread of metal coiled up and pressed and released.”

  I looked around at the hedge break and Lovejoy’s Hillock, closer now. We were not far from a simple well, also quarried by Goodman Lovejoy. A simple roof and a ring of stones marked its presence, with a bucket close by.

  “He must have liked to dig,” I said.

  Somehow this made the other two stare at me until suddenly we were all taken with a strong fit of merriment, laughing until we were close to tears. Slowly we quieted, laughed only in little bursts, and helped one another up, Bel and I raising Phoebe Wardwell from the ground.

  Together the three of us shut the door. The place was little visible afterward, having been planted with mosses and tussocks, though we had disturbed the delicate covering of snow roundabout.

  Phoebe Wardwell took her broom of twigs and carefully swept away the signs of our passing. We hopped from bare patch to patch, keeping our journey a secret from the snow. In only a few minutes we burst through the front door and raced to the fire, crouching beside it while Phoebe fed the flames anew with sticks.

  “Why, why did he do it?” I still could not grasp why he had undertaken such a feat.

  “Silas Lovejoy thought to save himself from the savages that way, if they came to use their tomahawks and arrows. None ever did, only some who wanted to trade or visit. But even that was too much for him,” Phoebe Wardwell said.

  “Why did he not leave and never come back?”

  “He stayed but was unhappy, people say. He would not leave the country where his wife and child were buried. And as Andover is thought to be a safe place, despite what happened that time, where people live to see their grandchildren, perhaps he thought there was no region more secure. Now and then he would travel away, and some said he visited the graves of his parents and saw the townspeople who knew him as a boy. But nobody knew much of his story, except perhaps Mr. Dane. And eventually Silas Lovejoy grew old and did not go from Andover any longer.”

  “I am sorry for him,” I said.“ ‘Tis hard to bear the thought that our families could not be saved.”

  “Yet some say that nothing is random, all for a purpose.” Phoebe shook her head. “I fear that I will never take hold of understanding, any more than I can know the ways and devices of mermaids under the sea or the horned beasts and the painted men in the forest.”

  “Nor I. Such knowledge is impossible, for ‘Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band to labor in the furrow?’ Or play with Leviathan ‘as if with a bird?’ No one can.”

  But I said no more, for ever since that day in Falmouth, I could only find that God gave us the natural liberty to err or do well but did not play with us like dolls and carved toys. Why some faithful prayers are answered and others not was a mystery. Nor could I yield to the thought that the daily, hourly fates of each of us had been destined before the worlds were made. Known, yes. But I could not believe that divine will chose my mother and father and all my kin to be slaughtered by the hands of Indians in the wilderness. Their own choices, my father’s bent toward the adventure of planting faith in the wilderness, and lack of foreknowing had led them there. Wild hearts plotted their destruction. The world was fallen, broken to shards like a clay pitcher. No, it was not the throne of an unchangeable will but the cross that hung in my mind with a glimmering, drowned light—the arms-out image of wide embrace that declared we were not alone in our sufferings.

  “We must leave, or else it will be growing dark,” Bel Holt said.

  “But we will come back, surely,” I said. “We must finish all these baby duds.”

  Bel shrugged. “Some time or other.”

  “I am so pleased that you came,” Phoebe Wardwell said.

  “We will come again,” I promised. “Fare you well until that time.”

  Remembering the trapdoor, I hurried to close it before we left, and marveled at how the square joined so neatly with the floor. The front room looked desolate with the fire dying down and the fresh logs not yet caught. I hated t
o leave a new friend there, so far from any liveliness—the people on the streets subdued in winter but their presence comforting.

  Once more I pledged myself to return and felt the regret in a farewell to one who lived in such a secluded manner. Goodwife Wardwell seemed sad for our going, though Bel was already talking in animated fashion of her plans for the morrow. As we walked away, I caught sight of a man with hoe and flintlock trudging in from the fields. A spark of red farther out must have been the fire to keep his hands from frostbite. Bel Holt shouted, and he called back in greeting.

  “One musket shot would do him no good against Indians,” I said.

  “No, and they don’t come alone when they mean ill to us. He was probably hoping for a chance at deer or bear.”

  “But all the same, I am glad he is close by,” I said. “What a lonely house.”

  “She will soon have a house that’s not lonely at all,” Bel reminded me. “Children make a house lively.”

  But still, Phoebe Wardwell must have been sorry to see us go, for she stood and watched in the cold until we were out of sight.

  “Such a grief in farewells,” I said, turning to see her russet cloak, a blot of color in front of the door.

  “She is my closest friend,” Bel said. “I would never let anything come between us.” She gave me an unsmiling stare that surprised me—was she warning me against becoming too friendly with Good-wife Wardwell?

  “I just meant that you are dear friends and so are naturally sad to say good-bye,” I said, a little distressed.

  That troubled feeling was soon forgotten, and parting was not such a sadness as it might have been, for here came Mr. Herrick along the road, an accident as it might be, or else in hopes that he might meet us—having perhaps heard that we were both away. And I was as astonished to see his face as if the tunnel had gone straight through death and come out on the other side, where I had no knowledge of what to see or expect.

  “How now? A good evening to you,” he called to us.

  “And to you—how came you here?”

  “You must have drawn me,” he said.

  “He came hunting for us, I expect, when he heard we had gone to sew,” Bel Holt said. “How I wish that Goodman Richard Dane had laid hold of the wit to do the same!”