Kathleen Kent - The Heretic's Daughter

We could not have created a greater furor had we appeared naked in the center of town. When we walked into the meetinghouse, there was no masking the animosity towards the Carrier family. Father, Richard, Andrew, and Tom had no real trouble finding a place with the men, but there was no pity shown from the women, who would not move an inch, forcing me to stand in the aisle with a squirming Hannah in my arms. Phoebe Chandler raised her chin to look at me down the long barrel of her nose, but then she caught sight of Richard’s thundering looks and quickly put her attention to the pulpit. She would later say in her deposition for the Salem court that Richard’s look caused her to be struck deaf for the whole of the service. It was only a pity that she wasn’t struck mute as well. Father looked over at me once, and to make him proud I raised my head and squared my back, glaring at the Reverend Barnard, who by this time had taken the pulpit entirely for his own, banishing the Reverend Dane to the pews below. It was no surprise, then, that his sermon would come from First Peter: “Thine enemy, the Devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour…”

Hannah soon became impossible to hold, so I tried tethering her with my hand round her wrist, but she pulled and protested, so I dragged her outside, and as the day was hot, I sat with her under the nearest wagon. I kept her content, letting her dig in the dirt, not scolding her for making piles of it in her apron. She looked every inch an orphan, unwashed and unkempt. Since Mother had left, we had all grown dirtier and shabbier, and I looked at the grime packed under my nails and thought with a twinge of Margaret’s smooth, clean hands.

We had stayed under the wagon for most of an hour when I heard the doors open and two men walked to the wagon carrying a third man, who was coughing and wheezing in the extremis of old age. They had left the service early to give the old man some air. As they approached, they began speaking, and before I could make my way from under the wagon, they had lifted the grandfather into the straw at the back. I could not then, without terrible embarrassment, show myself to them, and the longer they talked, the more difficult it became to come out like some lizard crawling from under a stone. I could only see their lower legs but I could hear their voices clearly and I hoped Hannah would be still and not give us away.

The first man said as he clapped the old man on the back, “What think you of them coming bold as ever to the meetinghouse?” He had recently switched his square-toed boots around left to right but they had not had time to form themselves to their new occupants, so his feet looked put on crossways.

The other man, shorter and stouter and with the lingering burr of a childhood spent in Scotland, said, “The children are fey, no doubt about it. But it’s him that makes my blood thicken.” He put a great weight on “him” and I knew he was speaking of Father. He continued conspiratorially, as one would tell a ghost story to a child. “What kind of a man hunts alone? In these woods. Filled with Indians. A dead shot that one. He felled a bear as big as a house with one shot to the neck. I saw the carcass, passing up the road. Biggest I’d ever seen. They say the Indians are even afraid of him.”

Then Goodman Crossways said, “I was told a few years back, in Boston he killed a man with one blow to the head.”

“No,” said Goodman Stout, “it was fifteen year ago if it was a day, and he knocked the man down in Billerica. Near killed him. But didn’t. He was fined for it, though.”

The old man had stopped coughing, and I heard the wagon creak as he lay back on the straw to rest. The two pairs of legs came closer together and their voices lowered to near whispers.

Said Crossways, “Don’t worry. You can speak. The old man’s as deaf as a post. They fined Carrier because who would have the bones to put chains on that giant? He was a trained soldier in the royal guards, you know. Some say bodyguard to the King, until he switched sides to Cromwell. It’s not many men who could have a witch to wife and still remain at liberty. Have you heard the worst, though?”

Said Stout, “Aye. Between us two, and God grant the second Charles a long life, being a Scot I have some fond remembrance of Old Oliver. But killing a king is something else entirely.”

Crossways shushed him and said apprehensively, “It’ll never be known for sure but that rumor of taking an axe to the first Charles has followed him for near thirty years as closely as hide on a dog. The man must be charmed to have escaped the King’s justice for so long.”

Then Stout spat on the dirt and said, “Charmed? An executioner’s always masked, so who’s to say? Besides, even if it could be proved he killed the King, who’s going to serve the warrant on him? You? Robert Russell, who has his ear to the ground, has put about that there is a secret society of Cromwell’s old army living as plain as a tit out of an ol’ bawd’s blouse. Here, right here in Andover. They look after one another and are sworn to avenge any of their own that are captured or mistreated. Russell says that they would come to the traitor’s house in the wee hours before morning and cut off the offending head, put it in a black bag, and plant it in some bog, just like they did to Charles the first. Oh yes, quite a charm. One with an iron point at the end.”

Crossways said, “Merciful Jesus. It’s not enough that we have witchcraft to fear, but now we must lock our doors against avenging guardsmen.”

Then Stout rested his foot on the wheel, brushing the powdery dust from his boots and clucking his tongue over Cromwell’s hidden army. Hearing Robert’s name made me wonder if he was working quietly as our murmet, shaking to life the breeze of fear-inspiring gossip to chase away the crows.

Stout continued, “And what about Roger Toothaker dead in his Boston cell? The jailer said that a tall man came to visit him on the day of his death. The tall man went in. The tall man came out and a few hours later Dr. Toothaker is stone dead without a mark on him. I tell you, there are secrets in that death. No matter what the inquest said.”

At that moment, the meetinghouse doors opened and the congregants, hot and restless to catch a bit of breeze, spilled out into the yard. In that moment I grabbed Hannah and we crawled out from the far side of the wagon, but as I stood up I turned, and the stout Scotsman caught sight of me. It must have appeared to him that we had formed ourselves out of the vapors in the air, for his eyes widened as he awakened from surprise to fear, the realization growing that I had overheard his gossiping. I felt his eyes burning into my back as I walked to stand at the wagon, waiting for Father.

On the way home we were all quiet, suppressed by the leaden, hateful stares that had followed us across the green and down Boston Way Road. I pressed myself closer to my brothers, despite the wilting heat, and held Hannah’s damp and drowsy body tightly in my arms. I looked at each of their faces and thought, here is Richard, a young man with a dark and moody nature. And here is Andrew, who is made a simpleton through ravaging illness. And there is Tom, whose sweet, enlivening nature is diminished daily by fear and uncertainty. I knew the composition of their inner selves, not just because it was revealed to me through their actions day to day, but because it was written plainly upon their faces. There was nothing hidden or contrary to give a lie to the face they gave to the world. And I had believed until that morning, as a child believes, that the intent and worth and very history of a person is stamped like a maker’s mark on a silver chalice.

But when I looked at Father dressed in yeoman’s clothes, the bones and muscles and tendons formed in opposition to rock and tree and dirt, his forehead crimped by months and years of staring into a planter’s sun, my understanding of him was shattered. I thought of Father’s old crimson coat hanging on the murmet’s back, the coat with the saber’s slash across the arm. Of the many times he had left us to go alone into woods where no other sober-minded fellow would venture. Of the deadly accuracy of his long-barreled flintlock. I thought of the tale-spinning of the two men at the meetinghouse and wondered how stories of a soldier’s life and the death of a king could be fashioned from the body of a man who to all of the new England shouted, I am Farmer, Husbandman, and Toiler.