Charis in the World of Wonders

by Marly Youmans

  “I fear we may be wet,” I said, but Captain Swan had gone back to telling Lud how to handle and steer the boat. I was glad of the Mi’kmaq’s sealskin to keep Samuel dry, though I fancied that some poor naked creature might come swimming over the waves to demand it back again.

  We settled ourselves and our bundles amid the goods, amazed by all we saw, and called out to the major, our voices seeming to vanish into the water and distance. We heard a pin-small answering shout. Captain Swan stowed our belongings more neatly, making all shipshape—a word that seemed to mean trim, with access ways to all parts of the boat.

  Anchor hoisted, we were off in a sliding, headlong rush that made us cry out, though whether in dread or wonderment, I cannot say. Yet we did not forget ourselves but looked back at the land and all we knew and Major Saltonstall. He stood on the bank by the river with Hortus and Comet until we must have been entirely out of sight, the tender bobbing behind us.

  “Hortus,” I whispered, hugging the bundle of Samuel close.

  We skirred down the river, occasionally glimpsing houses and other boats, and all was well. But when we entered the sea, oh, there was a commotion of crying babe and Jotham Herrick and I leaning over the rail of the shallop to retch and heave up venison stew from The Sun and the Bird. Lud proved the best sailor of us all, for though he may have felt uncomfortable and ill at times, he kept his meal to himself. Even the master of the boat lost a dollop of his last night’s supper.

  The river had widened our sight, but now the whole watery globe seemed to open and let us in, and suddenly we were keeping the land at a distance, Jotham Herrick and I looking back at the firs standing steady on the banks with mingled fear and anticipation of the unknown. We were but motes in a lively endlessness. Samuel wailed for a time and then seemed to take an interest in the waves, only occasionally spitting up small clots of milk that I wiped away with brine. He seemed thoughtful, his tongue exploring the salt on his lips before he turned his head to look me in the face.

  “The sea, the sea,” I told him.

  Jotham Herrick hung over the rail again, and afterward lay loose-limbed among the boxes with his head in my lap.

  I called out to the master, “He wants to know, is this a grown sea or a fair one?”

  “Oh, he’ll never make a sailor,” Captain Swan said by way of an answer, and brought us an armful of furs for protection from the spray.

  “Fair, then?”

  “The winds are blowing over the stern, and the day looks promising, Mistress Herrick.” He glanced down at my husband’s pale face, shook his head, and winked at me.

  I smiled at him in answer and said, “I have no wish for a sailor husband. He would fly away from me. But how can sailors be ailing on the ocean?”

  “They do take sick, especially when storms come,” Captain Swan said. “And many a sailor loses his midday dinner or evening supper before he is out of sight of land. Lud is doing right well.”

  Indeed, he still appeared to glow with happiness as he knelt beside the mast. What had we done, consigning our safety to an old man and Lud Duston?

  I traced a finger along my Jotham’s cheekbone, dreamed of the wide valleys that lay drowned beneath us, and said an outlandish prayer like nothing ever heard in a meetinghouse: Pray for me and mine, all you bones of sailors and pilgrims that lie at the bottom of the sea; assemble yourselves in the wet valley of bones and bring your small finger-bones together and pray for us, pray that we do not join you in the deep. And all you souls of the good departed, pray for us. And Holy Spirit, pray for me, for I have naught but wild and wildering words. Fearing and daring the waves, I trust myself to the mercy that goes with me whether I am alive or dead.

  In this way, I reconciled myself to whatever would come next.

  The ocean was not what I had thought it to be, for though I had been on a ship when younger, I did not remember much but blue sky and darker sea and coming into harbor at Falmouth. I did not recall the rising and turning expanses and how they could seem to be mirrored in my own swaying feelings—that what was in me could reflect and hold on to something so large and full of unreadable riddles.

  The waves gamboled as if they were alive, great joyful cats that burst against the boat or fled on by fleet tiptoe. I thought of the dread of the sea that is in so many who crossed the ocean to settle, or who handed the same on to their children and grandchildren—the fright of waves like demons or fallen angels that can make mountainous tossings, flinging a vessel up and up a mountain of green-blue glass and dropping it down so swiftly as if to make a ship a stone on a line to measure the depths of the undersea valleys and caverns. Surely they cowered from the deep as though shrinking from what is infinite. (And did not the infinite walk on waves at Galilee while the disciples in the boat cried out in dismay?) Such tales our travelers told of forked white lightning striking glitter from the sea or walloping a mainmast, and the sudden rains sloping from heaven and drenching the decks, only to transform into hail and batter the sailors with white stones until they were bruised, and at last to sift down as lamb-soft snow stars from heaven.

  Even on a fair day with favorable winds, the sea’s mind seemed turbulent with a constant motion, and I would not have been surprised to see any wild and quick wonder: a family of ice-blooded mermaids and mermen cleaving the swells, or some vast monster stirring the watery world like a spoon in a boiling pot and weltering in the waves. The swift-slanting wind caught the canvas and pushed us along faster than I had imagined the boat could move. Once an immense living blade leaped from the water in what seemed purest pleasure and smacked down into the depths, all its silver sheathed and glittering where we could not see. What dangers were scabbarded there, who could say?

  Captain Swan handed Lud several heavy bed rugs and asked him to cover the packages of paintings and the clocks.

  Everything grew damper and colder.

  The living pulse of the water was in us, always, and I fancied that I should always after be hearing the sea-murmur of waves and fish and whales in my ears, as I had heard it tucked inside seashells when on land. The cadence and cry of spirit and mystery in matter is clearer on the ocean. After some hours, the sea quieted a little, the waves making beautiful scrolls as they passed by us, seething and whispering of what they knew, and what we may never know. For part of the beauty of the watery part of the world is its hidden life that we glimpse only in the occasional aerial somersault of a fish, the fountain of a breaching whale, or the rare, riddling phosphorshine on waves.

  “I see why you would be a sailor,” I called to Captain Swan as he busied himself with shifting the lee boards. “And Lud also.”

  “Aye,” he said. “A man is bigger within when he goes to sea, and smaller without. And both are healthful for him to be.”

  The hours passed, and the night came on with the stars burning above us.

  In the darkness, there seemed to be even greater mystery, spreading around us forever, rounding the globe, as if some enormous soul lay secret and dreaming beneath us. The sea at midnight slumbers and sighs in shadow and moonlight, its vertical water cliffs sheltering drowned bones, pearls, the gold powder blown by breezes from far-off mines, finny beasts, and the mighty, jeweled Leviathan of the deep. I felt myself yielding to the sea spirit of reverie and trance, as the swells passed under and around us and I sat with my babe in his furs resting against me with his face dusted by moonlight and my husband asleep with his head in my lap.

  Behold now the accepted time, behold now the day of salvation. . . Wherefore come out from among them, and separate yourselves. . . and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord. . . The glad runnels of words streamed through my mind, leaving me wonderfully at peace, empty as a shell on shore is empty, yet full of the sea’s music.

  Once Jotham woke and clutched at me, his eyes wet. “A nightmare,” he said. “You were wax in my arms, pale and cold.”

  “That time is gone,” I said to him, stroking the soaked hair from his forehead. “It is a true drea
m, not of the future but of the past, for I might have died—thought of, wished for death. To be like my family. To be one with them.”

  He pressed my hand against his cheek.

  “But I am no longer lost, no longer wandering near the verge of death. We have a landing place ahead. And I have you and Samuel. If I am wax, then I am a candle that flames against the dark.”

  “Charis. My red-gold own, my only, my beloved,” he said, and closed his eyes, journeying back to the world of dreams. I hoped he would find me again there but alive, alight. Perhaps the visionary me would tell him what I had only that morning begun to suspect. My hand slipped to my belly. Was I again with child, our son or daughter to be born in a far-off port?

  I could not sleep, though Samuel and Jotham slept so deeply that they seemed to have sailed far from me, or to have sunk to the palaces of the mer-king and mer-queen. But it was not so; they were as near as waking. The natural witchery of the sea enchanted me, and the salt cloud wrapped me. I and mine were tiny, tiny, but the immensities of ocean filled up my thoughts. The horses of the sea—those creatures of the ancient world—ambled or leaped under me. I rode on the infinite rollers; I strode the depths.

  “My dear Hortus,” I whispered. “God send you sweet grass and fairest weathers.”

  It came to me that the sea is a mystery, its depths dreamed by God. To whom the sea belongeth: for he made it. And I thought that before the worlds were molded, the oceans were meant to ebb and flow and sometimes tower, reaching toward the heavens. God fashioned the waters and their salt, changeable secrets out of joy and pleasure, and likewise he formed me, and all he longed for me in my life was that I be alive, all the way alive and whole like the sea, doing what I was intended to do, being all of what I was meant to be—a woman rejoicing in creation and sensing another, better world next to our own, a mother and wife, a wielder of the needle, an apprentice to a goldsmith, and a candle on fire. The inchoate longings, unsure thoughts, tidal feelings, and waves of sorrow or unexpected happiness that I had felt since leaving Falmouth were currents in my own mystery, for who is not a riddle and a wonder to herself, to himself? For we are a crossing of the particular and mortal by the infinite in which there is neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Gentile nor English nor Wabanaki, and what could be more strange?

  As we rocked on the sea, the sure knowing came to me that Samuel and Jotham Herrick and I would safely find port, that we would arrive in the wondrous and fearful realm of Rhode Island, that it would be possible to live as deeply and as vigorously as the ocean lived, to be a created being completely alive. I saw it, I knew it, and gave my thanks for that blessing as I sank and crested with the waves.

  Sometime the next day, at about nine o’clock in the night, we came to a cove where Captain Swan unloaded his wares with Lud’s help and was paid in gold from England and Spain—pirated pieces of eight, perhaps. We moored there until dawn, and afterward the shallop was light and airy and made good time to the Marlborough dock at Newport. And so we came to a new home at last and made our way.

  EPILOGUE

  Haverhill, 17 August 1695

  My dearest Mistress Charis Herrick,

  Pray pardon me for being such a puny letter writer, and thank you for the gold-rimmed bowl made with your own hands. I am proud to own the pretty object, and to see the family names inscribed with your own clever fingers on the silver and the kindness therein expressed. I only wish that I could grasp those beloved hands, and embrace your dear children, Samuel and Elizabeth and the young twinned babes Nathaniel (we thank you for that honor to my Husband) and Jotham. I trust they will use their time well, not knowing how short or long it may be. And how I should like to talk with your dear husband, Mr. Herrick. We are extremely refreshed by the tidings in your letter, wherein we have an account that you are all alive and in health, and that the Newport business in gold work, silver sword-harness, and table vessels is robust. Pray, write me again how you fare.

  Mr. Saltonstall is now Colonel Saltonstall of the North Regiment, Essex, and also the master of Kellingley Manor in Yorkshire, an inheritance from his late father, Mr. Richard Saltonstall. He is hearty enough, though we have endured perilous times of late in Haverhill. The town has had a sorrowful number of goodmen and sons murdered while laboring in the fields in the past few years, particularly around the area of Pond Plain, and we fear some larger outbreak in the next few years. Ours has been nominated a house of refuge, so often we are much thronged with lodgers in the way of musketeers and pikemen in helmets and corselets or quilted coats, families with children, and, saddest to admit, lice. Between the militia and the courts, Col. Nathaniel Saltonstall is as ever thick in the business of the province.

  You wrote for several additional particulars about Mr. Dane and the trials, and I am sorry to have left you in suspense for such a long time. Andover suffered more than most towns in the late witchcraft ferment, with such hordes accused, and a mighty number of them in Mr. Francis Dane’s own family. I wrote you that the daughters and their children were imprisoned. But I have learned since that one of those hanged at Salem, Goody Carrier, was his own niece. Perhaps you knew her? And I believe a nephew’s wife was hanged. I may have mentioned that a former minister at Falmouth, Mr. Burroughs, was also put to death: I wondered if you were acquainted with him in the Maine region of the colony. Though twenty were hanged or pressed, a mort were jailed or accused, even small children. Mr. Dane himself was accused, having fought gigantically for his people, maugre the consequences to himself, and Mr. Barnard also spoke out against indictments as they increased in number. Mr. Dane was, I recollect, kind and affectionate to you and Mr. Herrick.

  My husband says that were it not for our brave Mistress Charis Herrick, he might not have been troubled with doubts and resigned so quickly after he was appointed to the Court of Oyer and Terminer. Perhaps he would have served longer as a judge of those unhappy people. Nor would he have known so soon that even a minister of Mr. Cotton Mather’s standing in Boston can be mistaken in this matter of witchcraft and phantom evidence. For you made him see anew both flaws and precious freedoms of this new-peopled America. Col. Saltonstall has suffered for his actions, both in being mischievously accused (though never arrested) and in being sometimes slighted in his work for the colony. Yet he is glad not to have the death judgment of innocents as a millstone to grind his conscience. It is marvelous to consider how your trials and wanderings and unjust accusation were changed to a kind of blessing in his case. For he well knew you were no witch and consort of devils. He is glad and thankful to Providence, sending his most fond regards and constant fair wishes to you and all your family. It is a joy and comfort to us that you are safe.

  I regret to say that your beloved, faithful Hortus passed on this spring. He was as well loved and pampered as a horse may be, but he lived in hope and was ever looking for you and in fair weather would trot to the pasture fence whenever a woman appeared near the house. To the last, he knew your name and would prick up his ears at any mention. We buried his bones in the lower meadow, and when Damaris came for a visit—she is well grown now (though nabbity in stature) and a skilled needlewoman—she planted forget-me-nots, ferns, and sweet-smelling flowers dug from the edge of the woods around a white stone to mark the place and make a little Eden. So now we have a Hortus garden to remind us of him and you and past hours that are fled.

  My heart flies out to yours as though you were my own daughter (Eliza is in health and with child again, and still married to Mr. Rowland Cotton, minister of Barnstable, who proves a vigorous husband. When next the colonel goes to Boston, I shall ship you a length of dyed linen cloth for the children and a piece of silk for you to make a gown like that I am also sending Eliza.) When shall we meet again, my dear, dear Charis Herrick? Perhaps in paradise, though we will not be the same as in our lives here. Yet it is promised that sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

  Thy loving foster mother and friend,

  Elizabeth Saltonstall

  GLOSSA
RY

  Note: All entries marked VEA refer to Robert Forby, The Vocabulary of East Anglia, an attempt to record the vulgar tongue of the two sister counties, Norfolk and Suffolk, as it existed in the last twenty years of the eighteenth century and still exists, with proof of its antiquity from etymology and authority (London: J. B. Nichols and Son, 1830).

  Andover—Now North Andover. Settlers from Ipswich and Newbury (including Simon Bradstreet, who would become the last governor of the colony) under the leadership of the Reverend John Woodbridge planted the town in 1641.

  aqua bryony—In his Complete Herbal of 1653, Nicholas Culpeper recommends bryony water for skin disorders—from bruises to leprosy.

  aqua mellis—George Wilson’s The Complete Course of Chemistry (1691) describes Honey-water or the King’s Honey-water as an alchemical perfume that contained French brandy, honey, coriander seeds, cloves, nutmeg, gum benjamin (benzoin, a tree resin), storax, benilloes (vanilla beans), lemon rind, damask rose water, orange flower water, China musk, and ambergris.

  arselins—Backward.

  ashcake—A simple hearth bread cooked near embers of a fire.

  beggar’s velvet—This is downy velvet, or “the lightest particles of down shaken from a feather-bed, and left by a sluttish housemaid to collect under the bed till it covers the floor for want of due sweeping, and she gets a scolding from her dame.” VEA.

  beggary—“The copious and various growth of weeds in the ‘field of the slothful.’ ” VEA.

  biggen—A baby’s cap.

  bishybarnybee—A ladybird. Ladybug. Many variations are known, including Forby’s bishop-barnabee and bishop benebee. (Forby speculates on many possible derivations, but claims that the sense is lost, though there may be a connection to a bishop’s scarlet and black robes.) Charis’ version clearly links to Bishop Edmund Bonner or “Bloody Bonner,” who won that nickname by persecuting dissidents under the Catholic rule of Mary Tudor.