Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  Ash asked Gustavus Hawkes what he knew about the epidemic.

  “The Indians say that whole villages died along the coast,” he told Ash. “It wasn’t as bad with freshwater Indians like the Nipmucks. They lost maybe one in ten.”

  “What were the symptoms?”

  Hawkes talked to the Nipmucks, partly in their throaty language, partly in signs, and they replied in the same way. Ash could not make out their meaning, but it appeared to be perfectly understandable to Hawkes.

  “They say the sick ones had fever,” Hawkes said. “Then they turned yellow just before they died.”

  “Turned yellow? It must have been a disease that produced jaundice. Had they ever seen these symptoms before?”

  “No. They say that the English gave it to them so they would all die and then we could cut down the trees and take them back to England.”

  “But there were no English here then.”

  “Yes, there were—white people anyway. There were fishermen on the coast a hundred years ago. They’ve been seeing ships for a long time.”

  While Ash and Hawkes talked, the Nipmucks masticated rapidly and swallowed convulsively. They asked for more bacon, imitating Ash’s chirping noises.

  “Why do they do that?” Ash asked.

  “They always imitate the way things sound.”

  “You mean they think it’s a language?”

  “Indians don’t think,” Hawkes replied. “But they can sound like they’re talking English when they want to, just like they can sound like a crow or a duck. They get all the sounds right, there just aren’t any words.”

  The Indians were very interested in Ash, too, because of his gray skin and hair and his voice. They had thought that he must be a ghost.

  “That’s why they threw the snake at you,” Hawkes said. “Everybody’s afraid of snakes, but the dead ain’t afraid of nothing.”

  “They wanted to find out if I was dead?” Ash said.

  “That’s right. What made them laugh was that you was scared of a blacksnake. Everybody knows it can’t hurt you.”

  “But I didn’t know the snake was harmless,” Ash said. “Tell them that.”

  “They wouldn’t understand,” Hawkes said. “They think everybody is born knowing that blacksnakes ain’t poisonous. Indians don’t know a hell of a lot, but they all know the same things.”

  “You mean they have no concept of ignorance?” Hawkes did not understand Ash’s question. He often had trouble knowing what this man meant.

  But Ash was excited by a new thought. Was it possible that the Indians were in a state of innocence? Of course they sinned. But was sin really possible in the absence of belief? As nearly as Ash could make out, the Indians had no sense of doing wrong even when they committed murder, and no guilt afterward. He asked Hawkes about this.

  “Guilt?” Hawkes said. “They think everything’s funny. If they could have flung a rattlesnake at you and watched it bite you they would have had an even bigger laugh.”

  “But that would have been murder.”

  “The way they look at it, the snake would’ve killed you, not them, and even the snake couldn’t help it. It’s a snake, so you have to expect it to bite.”

  Hawkes’s taciturnity disappeared when the subject was Indians. He had stores of information about them and could tell them apart by tribe and even by the many subtribes into which they were divided. The Nipmucks who threw the blacksnake at Ash, for example, were Hassamaniscos from one of the easternmost of the Nipmuck settlements. Magpie, the slave girl who had come to London with John Pennock, was a Quabaug Nipmuck and came from a village farther west.

  “How many Indians are there?” Ash asked.

  “Nobody ever counted ’em,” Hawkes replied. “But I’d say twenty, thirty thousand in the Bay Colony. They’s maybe four or five thousand Narragansets and Wampanoags down east of Boston, and quite a few Mohegans south of where we are now. The Pawtuckets and Massachusetts live up north, Nipmucks around here, Pocumtucks along the river, Mahicans in the mountains to the west, couple of thousand each.”

  According to Hawkes, it was the Indians who had created the open forest with its columns of light and its leafy naves along the oaks and chestnuts. Every spring they set the ground afire. The flames consumed the leaves that had fallen the previous autumn, killed seedlings that would not have survived in any case, and fertilized the damp soil so that grass and other browse prospered. The low fire, creeping among the roots of the big hardwoods, was not large enough to harm the trees. These burnings, combined with natural forest fires caused by lightning, kept the woods healthy and huntable.

  “They’s always plenty for the deer to eat,” Hawkes explained, “and no small trees to stop an arrow when an Indian wants to shoot a deer—or shoot another Indian, or you or me.”

  The Nipmucks stayed with them for three days and nights. It wasn’t only the bacon and Ash’s appearance that kept them. They were intrigued by one of the horses, and would walk along beside it, sometimes pressing their ears to its jouncing load. The horse carried Fanny’s spinet, and each time it took a step the instrument, muffled in quilts and blankets, emitted a twanging accidental chord. Ash noticed that the Nipmucks tried to be near the spinet and guessed the reason. He and Oliver unpacked it, fitted the legs back onto it, and set it up on a level slab of rock among the trees. Hawkes’s dogs sniffed at it, wagging their tails.

  Playing reminded Fanny of her father, but it was easier to play than to explain her reasons for not doing so. She played the scales. The spinet was out of tune as a result of its journey, but Fanny went on. Instead of playing Henry’s songs, she chose hymns—two new ones she had learned by listening to the music at Rose’s wedding, “Hear my prayer” and “O Lord, rebuke me not,” to which nobody present knew the words. Then she struck up Henry Purcell’s old Anglican favorite, “My song shall be alway,” and everyone sang, voices drifting away among the tree trunks until the Nipmucks, who knew all the sounds if not their meaning, joined in with Ash on the bass coloratura and made the air ring. Every note was flat; every verse was gibberish. Ash was filled with Christian delight. “Miraculous!” he cried during a rest between verses. Oliver’s right eye closed in a slow wink and he twisted his eyebrows. Fanny looked away and bit her lips. The memory of her father, which had made her weep the night before, was now making her laugh.

  As Hawkes later explained, the Nipmucks came from a praying village, one of many Indian encampments in Massachusetts that had been converted to Christianity. Surely, Ash thought, God had rescued Fanny’s spinet from Henry Harding’s wrecked house, brought it safely across the ocean, and caused it to be played in this desolate place in order to remind them all that He was everywhere. Even Fanny, who until now had seemed to have no heart for religion, was so deeply moved that she rose from the keyboard and ran off alone into the forest. She wore a pale dress and a white ribbon in her hair, so that she was visible for a long time in the moonlight, swaying as she ran over the mossy ground.

  Ash made himself look away. When he did, he found himself examining the Nipmucks’ faces. Now that the music had stopped, their features were once again as blank as those of Hawkes’s dogs, which were also gathered round the spinet. Were these Indians truly saved? Ash’s doubts came back in a rush, and he thought that it was far likelier that the Nipmucks simply enjoyed music than that they understood the idea of Christian salvation. These were men who believed that the dead feared nothing and threw snakes on sleeping Englishmen to test the theory. How could they be saved if they did not understand that real fear, the fear of hell, began with death?

  Fanny returned. She carried the white ribbon in her hand and her hair was loose like a bride’s. Rose asked her to play again; Oliver, speaking for her, said she was too tired. The English people were all looking at Fanny. Only the Nipmucks watched Ash, and when they saw the look of longing on his face they burst into explosive chuckles and spanked one another rhythmically on the bare skin, as they had done on the first morning while wa
tching him struggle with the snake.

  13

  Alamoth looked almost exactly as Captain John Pennock had described it—the big wooden house, scorched by fire, that Hawkes called the Manor, the cottages on the hillside, the homely English animals in the common paddocks, the young orchards heavy with English fruit, the fields of brown stubble in the oxbows beside the river. It was late afternoon when Fanny and the others first glimpsed the settlement from the top of the ridge. They were looking west. Rain was coming. In the dull light, the river, low and sluggish, was the color of tin. Across the broad valley, beyond the river, thunderheads were forming. Chain lightning flickered inside them. After several minutes they heard faint claps of thunder.

  Lightning probed the ground beneath the clouds as the storm moved eastward.

  A bolt of lightning hit a big green tree and set it on fire. Fanny could see the flames, burning furiously in a driving rain. Like so much else in America, this defied every law of nature she had ever been taught.

  This country looked like England—but like England in a dream. Nothing was as it should be. Everything was too large, too sudden, too violent—the birds, the strawberries, the forest, this storm the size of London, filled with lightning that set the trees on fire. Walking through the American wilderness was like walking across a giant’s body in a nursery tale. When would the monster feel their footsteps on his hide and stuff them into his mouth?

  The storm was much closer now. The thunder was deafening even at a distance of two or three miles. Alamoth, which had been lying in mellow sunlight ten minutes before, was now engulfed in shadow. Sheets of rain approached the river behind a wind that twisted the trees and sent leaves and twigs swirling through the air. The horses nickered and backed away.

  “We’d best get out from under this tree,” Hawkes said.

  They were standing beneath a dead trunk thirty feet high, the lightning-blasted remains of one of the gigantic yellow pines that Pennock had called firs. The bole, stripped of its bark, was five feet thick at the base.

  Oliver seized Fanny’s arm.

  “Fanny, look!” he said. “It’s a mast for the greatest ship ever built!”

  There was hope in his eyes again—perhaps there was some way to fell this monster and carry it to England. “We’ll float it across the ocean,” Oliver said.

  Hawkes led them back into the woods through a worsening darkness. They could hear the wind coming, but the place where they were was calm. The forest had been changing as they approached the river. The Nipmucks had left them the day before; when the party reached an outcropping of gray schist that was layered like a pastry, the Indians just stopped in their tracks and stood where they were, watching until the English disappeared.

  “Pocumtuck country begins here,” Hawkes had explained.

  After this, the chestnuts and oaks were fewer. They began to see groves of birches and maples, and there were many more conifers, dark stands of hemlock and smaller pines as well as the big firs, and a great many ferns and low bushes. These uplands were as full of berries as the grasslands had been—black and red raspberries growing on breast-high bushes among the hardwood trees, and a round dusty-blue berry, about the size of a gooseberry but unknown in England, that grew in stands of hundreds of bushes. It had a very sweet taste.

  There was an uproar of birdsong in expectation of the rain. Suddenly the wind began to blow, howling through the treetops and causing the blueberry bushes to twist on their roots. This made a loud swishing noise. The horses shied, eyes rolling, and Rose and the men had to whip them to get them to move through the bushes. In a moment, the animals were jogging forward along an invisible path among the blueberries, gobbling and kicking as they went. Big isolated drops of rain fell out of the sky. Fanny’s spinet twanged as it thumped against the horse’s back.

  Beyond the blueberry field, Hawkes led them under the shelter of a large flat rock that jutted out of a steep hillside. There was room enough beneath it for ten or twelve people to stand up. The men tied the horses to trees and pulled their loads under the shelter of the rock. As the first big raindrops pelted the horses, they laid back their ears and crowded together. Hawkes’s dogs ran to the back of the shelter and lay down together, muzzles on paws, eyes shut.

  Then the storm broke in earnest. Rain poured off the edge of the rock, spurting two or three feet straight out and then splattering on the brown forest dirt to form a brook. Lightning blinked among the rain-blackened trunks, thunder crashed overhead, the air smelled like burned copper. Fanny drew a deep breath. This was wonderful. The storm at Rose’s wedding had been nothing compared to this.

  Fanny felt herself being pulled backward, deeper under the rock. Rose had her arms around her.

  “Oh, please, Fanny,” she cried. “Come away from the harm.”

  Fanny resisted. Rose kept on tugging, a look of supplication on her face.

  “Oh, Lord,” Rose said. “What a fearful place! We must hold each other!”

  Fanny let herself be drawn back into the dimness. The storm was directly overhead now. A dozen brilliant flashes of lightning lit up the cave and Rose’s hair turned gold in the sulfurous light. She trembled and whimpered, grinding her skull into the soft flesh of Fanny’s chest. Fanny shifted her body, trying to draw away. Rose pushed against her harder.

  Fanny turned her head away. She thought that she had glimpsed something in the shadows deeper in the shelter. She looked again and saw nothing. Still, she felt that something was present. On the night they had gone looking for the ghost aboard the Pamela, Henry had taught her to see in the dark by looking to the left and right of an object that seemed to be invisible.

  Fanny tried the trick again. It wasn’t really dark beneath the rock, just dim and confused because of the storm. Looking slightly to the right of what she thought she had seen, she now saw it clearly. A girl stood, absolutely still, against the rock wall. Even the dogs had not noticed her.

  She was tall and very thin, with sharp bones outlined under the scratchy wool of a long butternut dress that was much too large for her. Her red curly hair, growing in a mop, was confined by a beaded headband. Beneath the headband, two long green eyes looked steadily at Fanny with a complete absence of fear. The eyes made no inquiries; the girl seemed to know exactly who Fanny and the others were. Her face was covered with freckles. When the lightning flashed, her skin looked so pale that it was faintly blue. A wooden bucket filled to the rim with blueberries stood on the ground beside her.

  The air was very cool now and drenched with the smell of mud and vegetation. Rain misted into the shelter. Rose muttered a complaint. Fanny covered her hair with her shawl and said, “Ssssh.” Instinct told Fanny that the red-haired girl did not want to be seen. If Rose opened her eyes she would certainly see her, no matter how still she stood. Fanny pulled up the shawl until it covered Rose’s whole head. The other girl watched, and Fanny had the feeling, without any need for words, that she understood what Fanny was doing, and why.

  The girl was Thoughtful Pennock. Fanny was so sure of this that she nearly whispered her name.

  Fanny was sure that this would be a mistake. So, hiding Rose’s face against her breast, she looked away from her and watched the rain beating down on the horses, which stood with their legs splayed and their noses between their front hooves.

  14

  When the storm was over, Rose insisted on having her sidesaddle strapped onto one of the horses so that she could appear before the people of Alamoth on horseback the first time they saw her.

  While this was being done, Rose retired into the woods and changed into one of her London riding habits.

  “You should be mounted too, husband, and properly dressed,” Rose said to Oliver as he tried to force the bit through the teeth of a bay gelding.

  “I’ve walked this far,” Oliver said. “I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

  “Very well. But it makes the wrong picture.”

  Rose, who always seemed to lose half her weight when she got on
a horse, put her foot in Oliver’s hand and sprang nimbly into the saddle.

  Riding beautifully, Rose Barebones emerged from the forest and proceeded at a walk down the muddy slope above Alamoth, her pleated skirt hanging in a perfect arc from her upraised right knee to the stirrup that contained her left boot. The storm had knocked many apples off the trees, and by the time Fanny and the others reached the orchard, most of the women and female children were crawling through the wet grass, picking up the fruit and putting it into baskets. The apples were about two-thirds the size of English apples, the first living things Fanny had seen in America that were smaller than the home version. The women and girls, all dressed alike in butternut homespun dresses and bonnets that hid their hair, stood up in their sopping skirts and stared as Rose and the others passed by. Then they hoisted their baskets of apples and chased after the newcomers.

  A hearty young woman with big jouncing breasts fell into step with Fanny. She gripped one handle of a basket, dragging along a little girl by the other handle. For several paces she walked along backward, staring into Fanny’s face. All the while, the woman and the child kept up a running conversation in a language or dialect Fanny could not identify.

  Then the woman began to speak to Fanny in a loud voice, grinning amiably while she looked her up and down. Fanny couldn’t understand a word. The woman would ask what seemed to be a question, wait for an answer, then ask it again in an even louder shout. After each burst of speech, she and the little girl exchanged looks filled with fun and country cunning.

  “I’m very sorry,” Fanny said, “but I don’t understand what you say.”

  The woman put her face close to Fanny’s and raised her voice again, shouting nonsense in which an occasional English syllable could be detected. The little girl giggled shrilly. Fanny thought the woman might be a simpleton or harmlessly mad. There had been a crazed female beggar in London who had done well at her trade by cornering people in the Strand and shrieking at them until they gave her money.