Astray: Stories

by Emma Donoghue

  At sunset most evenings I meet him where our cornfields join. He tells me that though marriage be our duty, it brings much grief, and from the hour a child is born his father is never without fear.

  Hugh Norman’s daughter was found in the well, five years old. I went by their house and offered a word of succor to the mother, Sarah, but she would not leave off howling like a beast. One of John Vincent’s daughters was there.

  Good news on the last ship. King Charles has been cast down for his Popish wickedness. Men of conscience govern England. Heathenish festivities no longer defile the name of the Lord, and there is no more Christmas.

  Here we work till the light fails. We have indentured men, some blacks among them, to hoe the land, but still too much of the crop is lost in the weeds, and strangled in rankness.

  Mary Vincent is fifteen, and comely, but not overmuch.

  Our court found Nathaniel Hatch and his sister Lydia Hatch guilty of unclean practices. They have strayed so far from the path, they are sheep who cannot be brought home. He is to be banished to the south and she to the north. We are not to break bread with them, or so much as throw them a crust. If we happen to pass either of them in the road, we are to turn our faces away. If either tries to speak to any of our community, we are to stop up our ears. No other town in Plymouth, or any other Christian plantation, will take in a cast-out.

  I gave my view in Meeting that the pair should have been put to death for their incest, as a sign to waverers. (And after all, to be cast out is itself a sort of death, for who would wish to roam this wilderness alone?) It has seemed to me for some time that our laws are too soft. If any man go after strange flesh, or children, or fowl or other beasts, even if the deed be not accomplished, it should be death. If any man act upon himself so as to spill his seed on the ground, it should be exile, at least. For the seed is most precious in these times and must not be lost.

  I spoke to Mary Vincent’s father, and he was not opposed, but the girl would not have me.

  I am a fruitless man. My grievous sins of pride and hardheartedness have made me to bury my coin in the ground, like the bad servant in the parable. I have begot no children to increase our plantation. All I can do is work.

  There is talk of making a law against the single life, so that every unmarried man or woman would have to go and live in some godly family. But what house would take me in?

  Nathaniel Hatch is rumored to be living still in the woods to the south of Yarmouth. I wonder if he has repented of his filth. Even if the wolves have spared him, he has no people now. As for his sister, no one has set eyes on her.

  Mary Vincent is to marry Benjamin Hammon.

  My face is furrowed like a cornfield. The ice leaves its mark, and the burning summer turns all things brown. But I will cast off vanity. The body is but the husk that is tossed aside in the end.

  Benjamin Hammon said to Teague Joanes that Sarah Norman told his wife I was an old killjoy.

  It matters not.

  Sin creeps around like a fog in the night. Too many of us forget to be watchful. Too many have left their doors open for the Tempter to slip in. I puzzle over it as I lie on my bed in the darkness, but I cannot tell why stinking lusts and things fearful to name should arise so commonly among us. It may be that our strict laws stop up the channel of wickedness, but it searches everywhere and at last breaks out worse than before.

  I consider it my pressing business to stand sentry. Where vice crawls out of the shadows, I shine a light on it. Death still seizes so many of our flock each winter, we cannot spare a single soul among the survivors. Better I should anger my neighbor than stand by and watch the Tempter pluck up his soul as the eagle fastens on the lamb. Better I should be spurned and despised, and feel myself to be entirely alone on this earth, than that I should relinquish my holy labor. They call me killjoy, but let them tell me this, what business have we with joy? What time have we to spare for joy, and what have we done to deserve it?

  The Lord has entered into the Temple and the cleansing has begun. Let the godless tremble, but the clean of heart rejoice.

  This day by my information charges were laid against Sarah Norman, together with Mary Hammon, fifteen years old and newly a wife, the more her shame. I testified to what I witnessed. With my own eyes I saw them, as I stood by Hugh Norman’s window in the heat of the day. His wife and Benjamin Hammon’s were lying on the one bed together. They were naked as demons, and there was not a hand-span between their bodies.

  It is time now to put our feet to the spades to dig up evil and all its roots.

  But already there is weakening. Our court was prevailed upon to let the girl go, with only an admonition, on account of her youth. The woman’s case has been held over until the weight of business allows it to be heard. But I have faith she will be brought to judgment at last after all these years of giddiness. In the meantime, Hugh Norman has sworn he will put her and her children out of his house. I gave my belief that she should be cast out of Yarmouth.

  Teague Joanes came to my house last night after dark, a thing he has never done before. He said, was it not likely the woman and the girl were only comforting each other when I saw them through the window, and what soul did not need some consolation in these hard times? I reminded him that consolation was not to be sought nor found in this life, but the next. He would have prevailed upon me to show mercy, as the Father did to his Prodigal. But I gave my belief that by their transgression Sarah Norman and Mary Hammon have strayed far beyond the reach of mercy.

  Then he asked me a curious thing, did I never feel lonely? In the depth of winter, say, when the snow fills up all the pathways.

  I told him I never did. But this was akin to a lie.

  Teague said he could not believe I was such a hard man. I gave him no answer, for my thoughts were all confounded. Then he said at any rate he would not part with me on bad terms, and came up to me and held on to me, and his leg lay against my leg.

  All that was last night. And today charges were laid by my information against Teague Joanes for an attempt at sodomy.

  These are bitter times. The wind of opposition blows full in my face, but I must not turn aside, for fear of my soul.

  At last our court found Sarah Norman guilty of lewd behavior with Mary Hammon, but sentenced her merely to make a public acknowledgment on the Lord’s day following. She lives now in a mud hut on the edge of our plantation, and her children with her, as Hugh Norman has taken ship back to England. With my own eyes I have seen some of the brethren stop to speak with her on the road. I ask why she has not been exiled, and there is none will answer me.

  The case against Teague Joanes has not yet been heard. He is well liked among those who are deceived by a show of friendliness and the Tempter’s own sweet smile. Many whisper that the charges should be struck out as unfounded. No one says a word to me these days. But I know what I know.

  Our paths crossed on the Lord’s day, and he spat on my back.

  I am not a dreaming man, but last night the most dreadful sight was shown to me. I saw Teague Joanes and Sarah Norman consorting uncleanly on a bed, the man behind the woman, turning the natural use to that which is against nature, and laughing all the while.

  And when I woke I knew this was no fancy but a true vision, granted me by the Lord, so that with the eyes of sleep I could witness what is hidden in the light of day. So I walked to the court and laid charges against them both for sodomy.

  The clerk did not want to write down my dream. So I took him by the collar and I asked, would he wrestle with God’s own angel?

  In the whole town there is none who will greet me. I hear the slurs they cast upon me as I go down the street.

  I work in my own field, though these days my bones creak like dead trees. I keep my head down if ever someone passes by. I wait for the court to hear my evidence. I must stand fast.

  Today I was called to the court. I stepped out my door, and over my head were hanging icicles as thick as my fist and sharp like swords of
glass.

  There in the court were Teague Jones and Sarah Norman and Benjamin Hammon and his wife Mary together with many others, the whole people of Plymouth. And I read on their faces that they were my enemies and God’s.

  At first I spoke up stoutly and told of the wickedness that is spreading through this plantation, and of the secrets that hide in the folds of men’s hearts. And then Teague Joanes stood up and shouted out that I was a madman and that I had no heart.

  It was quiet for a moment, a quietness I have never heard before.

  Then I was asked over and over again about what I had seen, and what I had imagined, and what I knew for sure. But I could not answer. I felt a terrible spinning. All I could think on was the evening Teague Joanes walked in my door. Not of the words he spoke, but the way he stood there, looking in my eyes as few know how to in these times. The way he laid his arms around me, fearless, and pressed me to him, as one brother to another. And all of a sudden I remembered the treacherous stirring between us, the swelling of evil, and I knew whose body began it.

  So I said out very loud in front of the whole court that I had perjured myself and that I withdrew the charges and that I was damned for all time. And when I walked to the door, the people moved out of my way so as not to touch me.

  I went across the fields for fear of meeting any human creature on the road. And it seemed to me the snow was like a face, for its crust is an image of perfection, but underneath is all darkness and slime. And I wept, a thing I have not done since I was a child, and the water turned to ice on my cheeks.

  The Lost Seed

  The story of Richard Berry comes from a cluster of terse legal records in Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, edited by N. B. Shurtleff (1855). A resident of Yarmouth (founded 1639, one of the twenty-one towns of Plymouth Plantation on Cape Cod), in 1649 Berry started accusing neighbors—Sarah White Norman, Mary Vincent Hammon, Teague Joanes—of various sex crimes. The following year, in a volte-face, Berry confessed to having borne false witness against Joanes and was publicly whipped. Three years on, Berry, Joanes, and others were ordered to “part their uncivil living together.”

  Kenneth Borris’s Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance (2004) digs up a few more facts about Berry’s targets. Sarah’s husband never took her and the children back, but went off to England with an inheritance, which he promptly wasted. Mary and Vincent Hammon, however, had a number of children before he died in 1703.

  In 1659 one “Richard Beare” was found guilty of “filthy obscene practices” and banished from the colony; this seems likely to be a variant spelling for the same old troublemaker.

  VACHERIE, LOUISIANA

  1839

  VANITAS

  This afternoon I was so stone bored, I wrote something on a scrap of paper and put it in a medicine bottle, sealed it up with the stub of a candle. I was sitting on the levee; I tossed the bottle as far as I could (since I throw better than girls should) and the Mississippi took it, lazily. If you got in a boat here by the Duparc-Locoul Plantation, and didn’t even row or raise a sail, the current would take you down fifty miles of slow curves to New Orleans in the end. That’s if you didn’t get tangled up in weed.

  What I wrote on the scrap was Au secours! Then I put the date, 3 juillet 1839. The Americans if drowning or in other trouble call out, Help!, which doesn’t capture the attention near as much, it’s more like a little sound a puppy would make. The bottle was green glass with Poison down one side. I wonder who’ll fish it out of the brown water, and what will that man or woman or child make of my message? Or will the medicine bottle float right through the city, out into the Gulf of Mexico, and my scribble go unread till the end of time?

  It was a foolish message, and a childish thing to do. I know that; I’m fifteen, which is old enough that I know when I’m being a child. But I ask you, how’s a girl to pass an afternoon as long and scalding as this one? I stare at the river in hopes of seeing a boat go by, or a black gum tree with muddy roots. A week ago I saw a blue heron swallow down a wriggling snake. Once in a while a boat will have a letter for us, a boy attaches it to the line of a very long fishing rod and flicks it over to our pier. I’m supposed to call a nègre to untie the letter and bring it in; Maman hates when I do it myself. She says I’m a gateur de nègres, like Papa, we spoil them with soft handling. She always beats them when they steal things, which they call only taking.

  I go up the pecan alley toward the Maison, and through the gate in the high fence that’s meant to keep the animals out. Passers-by always know a Creole house by the yellow and red, not like the glaring white American ones. Everything on our Plantation is yellow and red—not just the houses but the stables, the hospital, and the seventy slave cabins that stretch back like a village for three miles, with their vegetable gardens and chicken pens.

  I go in the Maison now, not because I want to, just to get away from the bam-bam-bam of the sun on the back of my neck. I step quietly past Tante Fanny’s room, because if she hears me she might call me in for some more lessons. My parents are away in New Orleans doing business; they never take me. I’ve never been anywhere, truth to tell. My brother, Emile, has been in the Lycée Militaire in Bordeaux for five years already, and when he graduates, Maman says perhaps we will all go on a voyage to France. By all, I don’t mean Tante Fanny, because she never leaves her room, nor her husband, Oncle Louis, who lives in New Orleans and does business for us, nor Oncle Flagy and Tante Marcelite, quiet sorts who prefer to stay here always and see to the nègres, the field ones and the house ones. It will be just Maman and Papa and I who go to meet Emile in France. Maman is the head of the Famille ever since Grandmère Nannette Prud’Homme retired; we Creoles hand the reins to the smartest child, male or female (unlike the Americans, whose women are too feeble to run things). But Maman never really wanted to oversee the family enterprise, she says if her brothers Louis and Flagy were more useful she and Papa could have gone back to la belle France and stayed there. And then I would have been born a French mademoiselle. “Creole” means born of French stock, here in Louisiana, but Maman prefers to call us French. She says France is like nowhere else in the world, it’s all things gracious and fine and civilized, and no sacrés nègres about the place.

  I pass Millie on the stairs, she’s my maid and sleeps on the floor of my room but she has to help with everything else as well. She’s one of Pa Philippe’s children, he’s very old (for a nègre), and has VPD branded on both cheeks from when he used to run away, that stands for Veuve Prud’Homme Duparc. It makes me shudder a little to look at the marks. Pa Philippe can whittle anything out of cypress with his little knife: spoons, needles, pipes. Since Maman started our breeding program, we have more small nègres than we know what to do with, but Millie’s the only one as old as me. “Allo, Millie,” I say, and she says, “Mam’zelle Aimée,” and grins back but forgets to curtsy.

  “Aimée” means beloved. I’ve never liked it as a name. It seems it should belong to a different kind of girl.

  Where I am bound today is the attic. Though it’s hotter than the cellars, it’s the one place nobody else goes. I can lie on the floor and chew my nails and fall into a sort of dream. But today the dust keeps making me sneeze. I’m restless, I can’t settle. I try a trick my brother, Emile, once taught me, to make yourself faint. You breathe in and out very fast while you count to a hundred, then stand against the wall and press as hard as you can between your ribs. Today I do it twice, and I feel odd, but that’s all; I’ve never managed to faint as girls do in novels.

  I poke through some wooden boxes but they hold nothing except old letters, tedious details of imports and taxes and engagements and deaths of people I never heard of. At the back there’s an old-fashioned sheepskin trunk, I’ve tried to open it before. Today I give it a real wrench and the top comes up. Ah, now here’s something worth looking at. Real silk, I’d say, as yellow as butter, with layers of tulle underneath, and an embroidered girdle. The sleeves are huge and puffy, like sacks of rice.
I slip off my dull blue frock and try it on over my shift. The skirt hovers, the sleeves bear me up so I seem to float over the splinters and dust of the floorboards. If only I had a looking glass up here. I know I’m short and homely, with a fat throat, and my hands and feet are too big, but in this sun-colored dress I feel halfway to beautiful. Grandmère Nannette, who lives in her Maison de Reprise across the yard and is descended from Louis XV’s own physician, once said that like her I was pas jolie but at least we had our skin, un teint de roses. Maman turns furious if I go out without my sunhat or a parasol, she says if I get freckled like some Cajun farm girl, how is she supposed to find me a good match? My stomach gets tight at the thought of a husband, but it won’t happen before I’m sixteen, at least. I haven’t even become a woman yet, Maman says, though I’m not sure what she means.

  I dig in the trunk. A handful of books; the collected poetry of Lord Byron, and a novel by Victor Hugo called Notre-Dame de Paris. More dresses—a light violet, a pale peach—and light shawls like spiders’ webs, and, in a heavy traveling case, some strings of pearls, with rings rolled up in a piece of black velvet. The bottom of the case lifts up, and there I find the strangest thing. It must be from France. It’s a sort of bracelet—a thin gold chain—with trinkets dangling from it. I’ve never seen such perfect little oddities. There’s a tiny silver locket that refuses to open; a gold cross, a monkey (grimacing), a minute kneeling angel, a pair of ballet slippers. A tiny tower of some sort, a snake, a crouching tiger (I recognize his toothy roar from the encyclopedia), and a machine with miniature wheels that go round and round; I think this must be a locomotive, like we use to haul cane to our sugar mill. But the one I like best, I don’t know why, is a gold key. It’s so tiny, I can’t imagine what door or drawer or box in the world it might open.

  Through the window, I see the shadows are getting longer; I must go down and show myself, or there’ll be a fuss. I pack the dresses back into the trunk, but I can’t bear to give up the bracelet. I manage to open its narrow catch, and fasten the chain around my left arm above the elbow, where no one will see it under my sleeve. I mustn’t show it off, but I’ll know it’s there; I can feel the little charms moving against my skin, pricking me.