A Measure of Light (20 page)

—

For a week, Sinnie and Mary continued with daily chores and the fall harvest—drying herbs, braiding onions, hanging shell beans—while nursing the child.

William fretted, beside himself with worry over his little girl.

He had begun building the house on the point that he had been planning ever since coming to Newport.
The great house
, he called it. Mary looked out of Littlemary’s window. Sea, sky—the wind pressed between them making clouds race, clipping the tips of waves, bending the grasses. She could see William, a blue-coated speck, his voice carrying as he directed the workers who sawed, swung mauls and pushed barrows amidst the stacks of yellow lumber.

Through the open window, the air bore the sweet, desiccated smell of spent goldenrod.

Indian summer
.

Mary turned to the room. It bore the plainness of haste, built to endure a New England winter: white plaster walls, adzed timbers, brick fireplace. And on a roped oat-straw mattress, Littlemary, asleep beneath a quilt made by Aunt Urith, strips of gold and brown slanted around a central block of red, appliquéd with a silk bee. “To remember your mother’s garden,” Aunt Urith had said, giving it to Mary when she left for London. “You must tell your children of their Yorkshire grandmother.”

This is what I have given the world
.

Children, as it was commanded of us on the ship
.

The women of Newport, like those in Boston, were continuously pregnant or nursing, bearing child after child after child—until most, by the age of thirty, were haggard and gap-toothed.

And I bear them in terror, no matter that each child since has been normal
.

William, Maher, Littlemary, Henry, Charles
.

With every birth, she fell more profoundly into despair. Sinnie had placed Charles, her sixth living child, to Mary’s breast and held him there, crooning, as Mary stared at the infant. She had no feeling for the baby or for herself. She was like a mote of dust, so weightless as to find no landing place.

Soon afterwards, she had turned from William’s caresses.

“Please,” she’d said. It was not to William that she had begged, but to whom, she knew not.
Please
.

She listened to the thump of the mauls, the rasping of saws; and heard in the sound William’s restless search for betterment.

In the meeting house, Mary closed her eyes. Littlemary sat beside her, bravely upright although she was white-faced and weak.

“We read in 2 Corinthians 3:6: ‘Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the Spirit: for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.’ ” The minister followed Anne Hutchinson’s teachings.

Within ourselves, we may apprehend God
.

So Anne had told her, in her strong voice. Thinking of Anne, Mary felt such a sickening as a child feels before punishment.

She looked at the bent heads of the Newport women. She worked side by side with them at whangs, spoke with them of pickles and radishes, of flax and thistles; they met her eyes with bland friendliness and she wondered what they said about her. They must respect her as the wife of a successful farmer, merchant and politician. Yet her education accorded only wariness, resentment. And since, after the birth of each child, she did not invite the women for ale and cakes but, rather, vanished from view, the other wives were affronted. They did not visit or send food.

She no longer prayed nor asked for forgiveness. God’s silence was absolute and the light of the world was not hers, neither beauty nor
joy nor peace—the baby’s face beneath his pudding cap, wild roses in a pewter pitcher. She was restrained as if by a forbidding hand.
Feel no joy. This is not for you
.

She turned her eyes to the window and watched the silent, tossing leaves. She had become a vessel for bearing children, never knowing when God might see fit to send another monster or call home the tiny creatures.

“Let us now give thanks for the life of Littlemary Dyer,” the minister said.

Only last week she had stood behind two men in Newport. They did not see her, and she had heard one tell the other of a newly published pamphlet. “New England Heretic, Mother of a Monster,” he’d murmured.

Fury had pushed her past, shaken by the same violent impulse that had made her stand at the Boston meeting house and walk down the aisle with Anne.

The children came through the door carrying baskets of mottled yellow apples. They poured the overripe fruit into wooden basins with a knocking rumble, went out for more. Over the fire, a kettle of beans hung from its pothook, making quiet slaps. The smell of baking bread wafted from the oven as Sinnie swung open the iron door and thrust her arm into the heat to tap the crusts.

Mary shuffled the letter back into its envelope. She went to a chair set well back from the heat and began slicing apples. Baby Charles slept in his cradle, bathed in sunlight. Through the window she could see a hedgerow of wild roses running down to the cove, their hips like varnished cherries. Everywhere, seed vessels burst with the insistence of survival. Burrs hooked socks or the fetlocks of horses. Silk exploded from milkweed pods and spilled into the wind. Orange pumpions sprawled, crusty-leaved, their vines frail as abandoned rope.

Mother, Father, my brother, my babies, Anne, Uncle Colyn
. Gone to Christ. And now Aunt Urith had written of her own impending death.

… 
a dimness comes over my eyes …

On the wind came the sound of shouting. Geraniums on the windowsill, blurred by sun, framed the shapes of William and another man who came around the corner of the house.

“You’ll not come into my house,” William roared.

“I’ll follow you wherever you go till you give me your promise.”

“I’ll promise you nothing. ’Twas your pig and you will pay. The suit stays before the court.”

“You have no proof.”

“No man in Newport will believe otherwise. Every other man’s pigs are on the islands.”

“Could be ’twas no pig but a wild creature.”

“I am a Lincolnshire farmer’s son. Dost think I cannot recognize the prints of a pig or the damage it can do? Now be gone with you, Nicholas Babcock. Else I will add to your charges the fire you let run
at random. Or harassment. Or the time you did not complete your corn fence.”

“I care not a fart for your charges.”

“Take your pigs to the island or strengthen your fences, else you will find yourself worse than fined.”

William stormed into the room, hurled his hat onto a chair stile where it whirled to stillness. He sat, working his scalp with his fingers.

“And last week my sheep killed by Marston’s dog,” he fumed.

And so many other things, Mary thought, that he found necessary to take before the court. Contumelious words from a neighbour. A copper kettle missing from the barn. These slights were as the small fires of a vast, inner conflagration.

Sinnie pushed the lug-pole from the fire, took up a basket of apple skins and slipped out.

Peelings curled from Mary’s knife, tapped to the floor, writhed and settled. She glanced at him without moving her head.

Ah, my William
. Her love for him was like a buried seed without the conditions for growth. She saw that he felt this and so channelled his own love into a passion of work, displaying pride to those who would condemn his wife, refuting the impugned “instruction of the parents.” He thickened in body. Coarsened in mien. And ever since Winthrop’s henchmen had taken away his arms, he had become outraged by the slightest infringement upon his, or another’s, rights.

“Littlemary is well, William,” Mary said, like a suggestion. “She is working with the boys. She carries a basket and hath a bloom in her cheeks.”

His fingers relaxed. He dropped his head back against the chair.

He was my young man. My glove-seller
. She wondered if he ever thought of the wealthy London merchant he might have become.

Truly, she knew, he loved his part in the creation of a new society, watching his children thrive, standing at the centre of a community
as one of its governors. He sat on committees to establish laws: prohibition of tree-peeling or fire-starting by Indians; cash rewards for fox and wolf heads; compulsory fencing of corn fields, woods clearing, the marking of pigs’ ears. He marched musketed militia in the fields. He began to practise law.

Loneliness, a cold rill.

“The letter you brought me from Aunt Urith.” She held it up. “My Uncle Colyn hath died. I long to go to England, William.”

“So did my mother die,” William replied. “So does every person here in the New World lose family in the old country. We cannot go stand by their gravesides.”

“I do not care to stand by his graveside,” she said. “I care to see my living aunt before she, too, dies.”

“You are the mother of six children.”

Outside, a cat scurried by, mouse in mouth.

“The children do not need me. They have Sinnie.”

“Sinnie is our servant.”

“And I tell you, William. They have Sinnie.”

Out the window, blurred by the swirled glass, she saw the chickens clustered round Sinnie and the yellow peelings falling from her hands.

“You cannot go to England. I forbid this, Mary. You must put it from your mind. The very thinking of it makes me … You cannot go alone to England! Where would … how … I …”

He rose from his chair, took up his hat. He rolled it on one finger, hand chopping the brim.

“Make an end to these thoughts, I beg of you.”

“William,” she said. “Please …”

She put her face in her hands, muffling her words. “I cannot imagine another winter. I cannot bear another pregnancy.”

And he is sick unto death of hearing these words from me
.

—

I long to go to England …
Sinnie had lingered at the almost-closed door long enough to hear these words. Then she had eased it shut, hurried over the scythed grass.

The children, in the orchard. Contented chickens, pecking at the peelings. The big house, rising on the point.

May I never leave here
.

Oh, may she not go
.

A sheep trail.

Juniper bushes.

Outcroppings of granite.

Up the coast, a group of Narragansett were digging for clams, distant, bright figures—pausing, stooping.

The waves rolled with languorous potency. They crested, crashed. Spent, frothing water slid towards her bare feet.

No head. A face, but …

Monster. I am. Mother of a monster
.

The children at the table. Speaking to William, to Sinnie. Their eyes meeting mine and then … then … shifting away
.

She pulled Urith’s letter from her pocket, pressed it to her cheek and slipped it back. She pulled her hood close around her face. Tears came to her eyes, slid into the corners of her mouth.

Neither to lie down nor to stand up. Neither to eat nor to starve. Neither to begin nor to cease.

She stepped into the shallows. Her feet were instantly numb. Watching—the gathering water, towering, sleek curve at its throat, the thunderous pound and rush, inevitable. She entered farther. Her cloak floated around her hips, swirling. The next wave struck her chest. She lost her footing, went down into froth and chaos.

Torture, howls, the fires of damnation
.

No
.

She staggered to her feet, turned back towards shore. A new wave buckled her knees. Again she fell, undertow dragged her over the hollowed shelf, she heard the sinister hiss, clutched at gelid pebbles.

Another underwater tossing. She gasped, clawed her way to the beach and crawled from the surf. Face down in the sand, she drew long, shuddering breaths.

Mary rolled onto her back and lay with her arms outspread.

No one watches
.

WILLIAM NUDGED THE TRENCHER
closer to Mary.

“Eat,” he ordered beneath his breath. She had taken a chill weeks ago and had only recently risen from her bed.

Every day, the wind rose at noon. Through the window, Mary saw November light slanting over the fields, glistening in the gone-to-seed meadowsweet. The children’s wooden spoons—too big for their mouths—tapped the trenchers, a small, furtive sound, like mice.