Charis in the World of Wonders

by Marly Youmans

  The pain of losing Samuel made my breasts ache and prickle with milk. I closed my eyes.

  “I cannot. I cannot lose more.” It might be best, and yet I did not have the power to give up my babe.

  “Yes,” Elizabeth Saltonstall said. “That is what I told my husband. You would not quit him, even for a time.”

  “It may be the most desirable for him to travel with you and Jotham Herrick,” Major Saltonstall said. “We cannot know.”

  “He is as strong a boy-child for his months of age as I have seen,” Jotham said. “We feared bringing him through the cold to Haverhill, but he was stalwart, and there is no mark of the frostbite on him. I believe it fitting to yield to Charis’ desire. She has lost enough. Too much.”

  “You also,” I said. “Without Samuel, we are barely a family.”

  “You always have a foster home here,” Elizabeth said. “Perhaps you will return to this region when Goody Mehitabel Dane returns to her rightest mind,” she added in a low voice, so that I knew she had been listening to Jotham Herrick.

  “I lost her affection entire,” I said, “and doubt she will care for me again. Yet I do not find that I earned her dislike. Her mother and sister disdained me and must have worked on her. It may be that they were more vile and black of heart than I understood. Bel Dane came to fear that I played some magical part in a woman’s drowning in a well, and in setting a mark on her own babe’s face. And yet she knew me, or so I once thought.”

  “Many are blinded,” Mistress Saltonstall said. “Many look at a fair garden and see only weeds. But as my grandfather Ward often said, the bed of truth never withers but is green all the year long.”

  Major Saltonstall bent to throw another log on the fire. He straightened, frowning.

  “I have heard no words but those that proclaim your wish to travel elsewhere, even in this terrible cold. You see? But let us talk, despite that, of discord. As magistrate, I have encountered rashly made censures and poisonous slurs, as well as silly men and women who thought that they could tiptoe around the edges of malefic witchcraft and suffer no harm. Even here in Haverhill, I have known a woman to consult the white of an egg in a glass of water and look for wisdom in strings and bubbles and odd coloration, or a shiftless Swan to waste his time peering through a hole worn in a stone to find out news of another world. You are no such woman. Let us imagine a strangeness and a wrong thought: that you have been named a witch. In that case, the panic of accusation will die away in time. People may come to reason rightly and know that not one of the outcries against you was significant, that they were all, indeed, indifferent matters that could be passed over. Yet they may look elsewhere for trouble and see it where there is none.”

  “The Holt daughters were just such idlers with fortune-telling and sieve-and-scissors,” Jotham Herrick said. “The elder showed Charis an abundance of spite and jealousy from the dawn of their acquaintance.”

  “Yes, well, they were long known in Andover and I but a stranger,” I said. “A wanderer who appeared out of the dark and forest, where the tribes are at home. And our people are afraid of night and trees and wild men. Perhaps it is no wonder they did not accept me at the last.”

  Yet I had come to feel that I had a place in Andover. By now Constable Foster would have arrived, met hue and cry, mounted search parties, and made an inventory before witnesses of any of our possessions left behind.

  “If you do wander more and return to the colony, be sure to come to us in Haverhill,” Major Saltonstall said. “You are fine and useful citizens, the sort we need in our wilderness towns. All of those who sailed in the first ships dreamed of a new Jerusalem, a brighter world, and a covenanting of like-minded souls.” Here he spoke more openly than before, although he did not directly address the charge against me. “But the dream fades when our people are too quick to see evil gleaming from the faces of their fellows. That none of them could discern virtue in you, shining like a golden lamp in a dark place, I cannot fathom or approve.”

  “I hope that they are not unkind to those in Andover who were kind to me. Especially the Danes.” I leaned my head on Elizabeth Saltonstall’s shoulder, wanting comfort, and she put her arms around me as if I were her own daughter.

  “Surely all the fire will die out now that we have gone,” Jotham said.

  “I wonder.” Elizabeth Saltonstall looked up at her husband. “I do wonder.”

  “When a bloodletting begins, the flow is seldom stanched for a long time after,” the major replied.

  It was a peculiar conversation, the boundary sometimes blurring between the real and what we pretended was but fancy. Our words were better that way. For how could a magistrate assist a witch?

  I saw nothing of Damaris, for Nabby had taken the girl to her daughter’s house in Haverhill to sew infant clothes. We glimpsed no one else while we stayed there. No one came in search of us, and I believed the major quite careful enough to evade any future questioning as to our whereabouts. I could imagine him replying, “Oh, was she slandered? Truly? I hope that you find some fresh trace of them soon, for Mistress Charis Herrick is dear to us all, and I would not like to think of her driven to the wilderness like a beast. For she is no witch. Of that I am sure.”

  But we supposed that no one else had dared the river. I thought of the break in the ice and the abandoned coverlet, perhaps still fastened there, and hoped any pursuers would judge us drowned.

  The next morning five of us set off at dawn after breaking the night’s fast with boiled cornmeal, dried cranberries, and cold meat from the day before. Elizabeth Saltonstall wept at parting, and so did I, knowing that I might not ever see her again. She begged me to send word of where I was as soon as the place was known.

  “Your mother would be so worried. And thus am I,” she said.

  “My mother believed that courage came from doing,” I said. But I remembered her end, and how death found all that I loved. And surely they were brave.

  “Godspeed, dear Charis, and may all that is loving and holy be as a cloak to shelter you.” She touched the line of a tear on my cheek, and we looked long at each other, each storing the other in memory as best she could.

  The journey party was composed of me and Samuel, Major Saltonstall, Jotham Herrick, and the thatch-headed boy encountered on the long-ago day that I stumbled onto the fields beyond the Saltonstall house. Lud was not quite so bashful as before, though he avoided looking me in the face when he informed me that he was now a man of seventeen.

  “Lud is a first-rate shot and owes me a fee or two,” the major said. “And is as loyal to me and mine as I have ever known. He does not know the details of what has happened, just that you were not satisfied with Andover and wish to journey by boat. He will have to ride pillion with me on Comet, as I know no other horse readily to obtain.”

  “A thousand times thank you,” I said, and the tears stood cold in my eyes.

  “No need for more thanks,” he said, “though I believe your horse will be glad to share his household load with mine.”

  Though I was not sure that Hortus had quite recovered from his adventures, he appeared eager to be off. But he was always the best of horses for equable temper and willingness to please. I rubbed my face against his and kissed his nose.

  “You make me glad to be traveling,” I said. “Be especially mannerly whenever Mr. Herrick holds the reins, you hear?”

  He blew white clouds on my hands in response.

  I mounted the pillion-pad on his loin behind Jotham Herrick in the saddle, feeling much warmer than before because Elizabeth Saltonstall had rigged up some of her youngest son’s old breeches for me and found an outgrown pair of heavy boots, well gartered with leather strips to stay on my legs. Geared in tucked-up gown, breeches, hose, and boots, I felt wonderfully free, riding in the midst of our bundles and bags, with the blackened colander dangling by one handle. I found myself but little ashamed to take to the paths and cartways and highways in the guise of a boy, something that was far safer for a wi
nter rider in the wilderness.

  Elizabeth had enveloped Samuel in furs, and now he was a tidy, sealed package. She handed him up, and he blinked himself awake and gave me an open-mouthed smile that made me laugh. She had devised a sort of harness with a shawl and soft leather ties that would press him close to me or Mr. Herrick, as we meant to take turns holding the reins or riding pillion. We had found that the rider in the saddle had more room for a babe, though hands were occupied. I suppose she may have had a fear of Samuel falling into the roadway and being trampled by hooves. But I was glad for something that could leave both hands free for reins when needed, although in truth I longed to have both arms close about him.

  “I am well pleased with you, little man,” I said. “You are small but a mighty boy for adventure.”

  He smiled at me uncertainly.

  “Oh, Elizabeth,” I whispered, and hugged Samuel close before yielding him to my husband.

  “God bye, dearest Mistress Saltonstall,” I cried as Hortus walked us away from the house. Jotham Herrick added his farewell to mine.

  She must have stayed in the cold until we were quite out of sight, for she called even when we could no longer make out her words. I watched her, twisting away from my husband so that I could see her grow smaller, smaller: a doll, barely to be recognized as my foster mother who had once washed and dressed me when I was in rags and filth from the wilderness and crammed with grief.

  “See there,” I said, “Elizabeth Saltonstall is still watching.”

  “She was good to you,” Jotham Herrick said.

  “I shall miss her. So greatly.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It is sad to be far from friends. True friends are few in this life.”

  “True friends,” I echoed. Soon we would have only ourselves for earthly help.

  I guessed it to be some fifteen miles to Newburyport. The major knew several boat captains near or in the town and wished to hunt for them.

  “Although we have had so much freezing weather,” he said, “yet the salt from the sea will keep the river to the east from hardening. I cannot believe that the waters could be frozen in November so close to the ocean.”

  “In Essex they will be talking about the winter of 1691 for many a year,” Jotham Herrick said.

  “Our minister lectured on the famousness of this winter and God’s judgments on the last Sabbath,” Major Saltonstall said. “He said it will be remembered for more than three hundred years, if the world lasts so long.”

  “Was it Mr. Ward? Your wife’s father, you mean?” I had seen the old man preach when I lived with the Saltonstalls and had been surprised by his energy, though he now had a younger minister, a Mr. Rolfe, who often preached in the afternoons and lived in the minister’s house. Haverhill had done better by its old minister than Andover, where they had “robbed Peter to pay Paul,” voting to take monies from Mr. Dane to pay Mr. Barnard.

  “It was he; my father Ward has the fire of a young man still, at least when he is well launched on his theme,” Major Saltonstall said. “Did I tell you that Benjamin Rolfe was chaplain to the 1689 expedition to Falmouth under Major Church? He well comprehends what the French and Indians can do. And has confessed some natural dread of what they might do to him, or to his family, when he has one.”

  “No, I did not. I should have liked to talk to him,” I said.

  “When we were last in Haverhill, I heard Mr. Rolfe discuss the conversion of some Wabanaki,” Jotham Herrick said.

  “No doubt we should have converted more of them,” Major Saltonstall said.

  Lud grunted to show respect for this thought, or perhaps amusement. It was hard to tell. Riding pillion, he came along quietly on the major’s roan horse, seldom speaking.

  “My father claimed that we do not understand the Indians, nor they us,” I said. “I suspect that is true.”

  “We barter and settle on Indian land, though they hardly believe in the finality of payments or any sort of deed—what can a parchment with marks be to them? So they butcher our people, and sling our infants against a stone or tree. We execute revenge. They scalp us. So we offer bounties for their scalps. And there is to be no end,” Major Saltonstall said.

  After that, we were silent for a time, scanning the landscape for movement but finding only the snow between the trees and the upflung branches of more delicate young shrubs and saplings, each twig holding up a bud of ice. The road sometimes kept us in sight of the river, sometimes curved away. We jogged along comfortably, covering the ground at an easy pace, chatting about indifferent matters.

  By the third hour, Samuel had wakened and slept, wakened and slept. When roused, he burbled to me and the sun and sky and trees in his language, and Jotham and I spoke back to him, though we did not know what he might be saying except that the world was exciting and brave with color and birds that cut the air overhead.

  Along our way, after stopping several times to examine the river for open water, we began to hear music from its bed.

  “The salt flow,” Lud said. He did not turn to us when he spoke but kept his eyes on the forest, sweeping his gaze back and forth.

  But we saw nothing of any tribe, who were no doubt wiser than to be out and wandering on such an inclement day, and in another mile arrived at a cluster of tiny, steep-roofed houses by the water. There we looked for rest. A slough of churned-up, frozen mud and snow by a horse block was our invitation to dismount. On a wooden bracket close by hung a signboard of ingenious make, the frame being rectangular but with a burst of gold-painted spikes all around, framing a weather-beaten dove and the words The Sun and the Bird, along with some smaller letters, partially worn away and no longer readable. This clearly signifying an inn, we alit for nearly an hour.

  The major searched for a boatman of his acquaintance and eventually found him in a nearby house, sodden-drunk and of no fit service to us. Our luck was fairer.

  A red-faced woman ushered us inside, bellowing to a servant to “skip lively” and help with the company. My shift, petticoats, and skirts shoved into place, I appeared once again a proper lady-wife to be shown to an inner room where I could nurse my child in peace. Jotham Herrick fetched me a great mug of mulled ale, two-pence the ale quart, and he himself had a tankard of flip with brandy, and after that we were warm and merry and full of hope for what the day would bring. The goodwife brought in a bowl of venison stew for us to share, and I found that, though the day was still young, I was already eager to ladle out a meal. Lud saw to the horses in the yard outside, though he too traipsed in for venison and a hot drink, as did the major, just before we left.

  Back in saddle-and-pillion, our party followed a level road packed with snow. This time I held the reins and babe. In some half a mile we reached a house where Major Saltonstall wished to stop. While the horses halted in the road, Lud walked off into some trees to “exert the limbs,” as he said.

  A stack of bent wood staves leaned against a vessel on blocks to one side of the house and clearing. The tiny clapboard hut with its precipitous, snow-shedding roof and the chimbley puffing smoke seemed inconsequential next to the boat.

  In answer to the major’s halloo! and rapping at the door, out popped a young man, dragging on his shirt and waistcoat and trailed by a little girl in shift who clung to his breeches. He tucked her back inside, calling something over his shoulder, and shut the door.

  The major appeared to be laughing as he shook hands, and the two conversed for some time, the young man talking volubly and gesturing at the boat in the side yard and pointing toward the direction of Newburyport. At last he nodded to the rest of us and disappeared back into the house.

  “His boat is in no condition to sail, but he knows someone who is bound for Newport on the morrow,” Major Saltonstall called to us as he untied Comet and led him into the road.

  “Newport!” Jotham Herrick tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Pirates,” I said, twisting in the saddle to meet his gaze.

  “And Quakers,” he said.

 
Samuel, having had his fill of milk, half-hidden beneath my cloak, crowed and made us laugh.

  “Wolves. Or so our busy meddlers claim.” The major glanced up at me.

  “Mary Dyer,” I said, remembering how she walked from Rhode Island to Boston to be a witness to her own liberty of creed, knowing that she would be hanged by the godly. A rush of fellow feeling made me think kindly of her. Were we not in some ways the same, as wanderers and as women liable to be caught by the hangman’s noose? And had not this great land of wilderness been testing my every belief, as though to walk through the New World meant to journey after truth?

  “I doubt that Quakers are wolves,” my husband said, “though many tell such tales.”

  “Whether they are or not, we must do what we must do. We have no freedom to be choosers,” I said. “And there I was dreaming of a ship with white sails stacked high and the sight of English castles.”

  The major looked up as Comet nudged him in the back. “Stop that,” he said, reaching for the bridle but not turning his gaze from us.

  “I would not like to try for a merchant ship out of Boston, not when you might be pursued before it should depart,” Major Salton-stall said. “Too many people would be involved in taking passage on a great ship, even should one be available. And a comely woman with red hair and a babe, seeking to travel the seas in winter. . . it is not a sight of the commonest.”

  “My wife is in no wise common,” Jotham Herrick said.

  “Yes, and we would not want to see her dragged through the streets like a drab found thieving. If we do not take this chance, there may not be another at this time of year,” Major Saltonstall said. “I am sorry for the risk, but it is the truth.”

  He swung into the saddle, shouting for Lud, who soon appeared in the distance, musket over one shoulder, having scouted ahead. The horses soon caught up, and I held the gun briefly as he clambered up behind the major.

  The horses walked off, steady and unhurried.