Crane Pond (6 page)

Hannah laughs. ‘They must have wanted to greet you.'

‘The fox might greet
them
.'

‘Not with all of us standing here.'

He becomes aware that something is not right. For a second he can't work out what it is. Then it dawns. ‘Where's young Hannah?' An uncomfortable silence. His heart lurches. ‘What's happened to her?'

Sarah, Susan and Bastian are standing a little behind the family group and with them is a neighbour, Nurse Hurd. Sewall has been assuming that she was making a social visit, but of course she is also regularly summoned to help with sickness in the house.

‘Indoors,' Hannah says, looking guilty. ‘She's a little droopy, that's all.'

 

Daughter Hannah is slumped in Sewall's own chair, her rear pushed up against its back so her feet don't reach the floor. She looks even younger than her years. Her head is flopped forward limply over her chest but she raises it when she hears him approach and smiles weakly.

‘How are you, my love?' he asks. He knows the answer and hopes his fear doesn't show in his voice.

‘I don't feel very well,' she replies, too young to dissemble.

‘I think you must go to bed. Then you'll soon feel better.' He turns towards Nurse Hurd, who has followed him in. ‘That's right, isn't it, Nurse?'

‘Yes, Mr. Sewall, bed rest is the best cure. And I will give her powdered fox lungs, as much as will cover a threepenny bit.'

‘All right, father. I'm so glad you are home.' She smiles again, though her smile manages to include a small grimace at the prospect of fox lungs. Something about her reaction upsets him, an acceptance of her fate, a kind of passivity. Here he is, a thirty-eight-year-old man in rude health, and here is his child, struggling and in danger. It seems unjust. Or rather it seems to reflect justice of a deep sort, divine justice. Her illness is the inevitable result of his weakness.

He takes a vow not to heed the opinion of others in the future. ‘Save me from the fear of man, that brings a snare,' he prays under his breath. He will do what he thinks is right, or rather, what God wishes him to do.
In return let my daughter Hannah recover from the smallpox.
But there can be no ‘return'. That was the merchant in him speaking. You do not make deals with God. You cannot earn a cure for yourself or for one you love, any more than you can earn salvation. All you can do is be the sort of good person whom evil cannot touch, as oil cannot mix with water.

Within days there are fifty or sixty pocks on Hannah's face, and many more on her arms. They sail over the surface of her body like reprieved pirates sailing over the surface of the ocean. But then they begin to fade. Within a couple of weeks Hannah is down from her bedchamber and with Sam and Betty and Joseph once more. She is only lightly marked. Sewall thanks God, and promises to be strong and vigilant from now on.

 

 

 

If our
Walls
had not been broken down, had worse things than
Indians
, even
Devils
, broke in upon us, as they have sadly done, to Confound us with such
Praeternatural Operations
, as have been the just Astonishment of the World?

—C
OTTON
M
ATHER,
Memorable Passages,
relating to New-England
(Boston, 1694)

S
ewall sits and watches at the window, his habit first thing on Christmas morning. It's snowing heavily as if to blot out the day. He fears it will keep everyone in their houses and prevent the shops from opening, as if Boston is celebrating Christmas papist-fashion even though it isn't. There's no such thing as a holiday, or Holy Day, because all days are holy. Religion is not intermittent.

A week ago, he went to visit young Sam at the home of Mr. Hobart, minister at Newton. Sam is helping with the chores in exchange for receiving tuition from Mr. Hobart, who is well-known as a teacher (Sam is thirteen now, time for him to get experience at living in another household). He asked if he could come home for Christmas and Sewall spoke to him sternly, telling him that Christmas was no different from any other day. Now he wishes he had taken another tack. God would understand the difference between Sam visiting home because it's Christmas and Sam visiting home because he needs to visit home. It's just that Sewall is frightened of confusing himself by making such fine discriminations. Perhaps he fears that Sam coming home would have
felt
like Christmas, whatever Christmas might feel like.

There's a sudden cry and Sewall starts, but it's just a passing carter rebuking his horse, which is finding the going difficult. And the cart is piled high with large sections of dead pig. In fact a head is staring back at him from the top of the mound, its mouth laughing through the jiggling flakes. Sewall rushes out of the house, hails the carter. ‘Where are you off to?' he asks.

‘None of your business.'

‘Do you know what day it is?'

‘It's any other day to me.'

‘And to me.'

The man tugs his lead-rein. ‘I have to go. I'm taking this to Goodhew, the butcher.'

‘So Goodhew is open today?'

The carter turns back and gives him a sharp look. The last thing Sewall wants is to make him feel guilty because he's working today. A solution suddenly presents itself. ‘Let me buy a piece of pork, my man.'

‘These are for the shop.'

Sewall gets out his purse. ‘I will save my piece a journey. I'll pay the shop price.'

‘I don't know what the shop price is.'

‘Well, a good price.' He takes out three shillings. ‘This price.'

The carter's eyes brighten. ‘It comes from Westfield, this pork does,' he explains, perhaps hoping by giving the pork a pedigree to justify the amount of money he intends to accept.

The pieces are very large, obviously intended to be subdivided in the shop. The tang of raw meat collides strangely with the iron of snowy air. The small eyes of the pig's head resting on top of the mound look down at Sewall while he chooses. A little drift of snow on its scalp gives the effect of a wig. He becomes aware of other heads grinning at him from different places in the heap. He picks out a leg which proves almost too heavy to carry and staggers up his path with it while the carthorse sets off again, its hooves oddly thudless on the snow.

His wife and Sarah are in the kitchen and look up in amazement as he enters bearing meat. ‘Husband, what have you done?' asks Hannah.

He looks down at the meat he is carrying like a mighty club. ‘I bought it from a passing cart,' he explains. He gives the leg a swing and hoists it with a thump on to the table.

‘I was going to boil some eels and serve them on sippets,' grumbles Sarah. ‘I had some off an Indian yesterday, for sixpence.' She glares at the meat which is now lying on the table top like a whale washed up by the sea. ‘That leg of pork is enough to feed an army.'

‘We can have a feast,' he says. Hannah gives him a sudden hopeful glance.

He realises she thinks he must have relented. ‘To mark the
absence
of Christmas.'

Hannah and Sarah decide to spit-roast the pork on the big fire in the main room. While this is being done, Sewall retires to his study to pray. He prays for Sam, over in Newton, that he may not feel too lonely or tired. He prays for his timid daughter Hannah, that she might blossom. He prays for his spirited daughter Betty, that she might be free of fear of hell. Or rather, since we must all fear hell, that being the whole purpose of hell's existence, that she won't be
overwhelmed
by fear of hell. That hell, in short, will simply be useful to her. Then for little Joseph, that he might fulfil his prophetic promise and become a man of God. And for baby Mary, that she might continue to thrive.

He prays for his dead children too, for John, the firstborn, whose death followed Sewall's failure to confess his sins when he was admitted into the South Church, for little Hull, who suffered from fits but lived long enough to say the word
apple
, for Henry, who snored gently until he died on a bleak December morning, for Stephen, whose entombment made the family weep so inconsolably, especially young Sam, and for Judith, his only lost daughter (so far).

When they'd come away from the graveyard after consigning Judith's coffin (bearing the year 1690 made with little nails) into the tomb, a man called out at them: ‘Pitiful dogs!'

Sewall recoiled as if shot by an arrow, his hand over his heart. Tears sprang into his eyes. The abusive man looked embarrassed at his bull's-eye and sneaked away. ‘Husband,' Hannah said, squeezing Sewall's arm, ‘take no notice. He's addled in his wits.'

Obviously that was true, but Sewall took no comfort in it at first. A man with no brains in his head might be the perfect vehicle to articulate God's judgement. It was as if the lunatic had been licensed to tell him that Judith's death was caused by his laxity in the matter of the pirates.

When he'd returned from the trip to New York and discovered Hannah with the smallpox he had vowed to do what was right in future without taking notice of any man's—or woman's—objections. The smallpox had duly abated, but since then Sewall still found himself caring about what the world thought of him and fearing the disapproval of his peers. He wished to rise to a position of importance and influence in the community, and strangely you can only achieve that by allowing yourself to
be
influenced by others, as if influence is a sort of currency, to be given and returned.

‘He said
dogs
,' Sewall had told Hannah.

‘I know he did, my dear,' she said consolingly. His heart warmed at the thought that she could still wish to cheer him while she was trembling with grief herself.

‘I mean, he didn't say
dog
, in the singular. Perhaps it wasn't a remark directed at me.'

‘I think it was a remark directed at the world in general.'

‘Certainly
you
aren't a pitiful dog, my love,' he assured her. ‘Not even a lunatic could think that.'

‘I must admit to feeling a little pitiful, just at present,' she'd told him.

But whether the man's barb was directed at him or not, Sewall is the pitiful one after all. Even after making that undertaking on his arrival from New York, he was perfectly aware, day in day out, that he was guilty of a myriad of tiny cowardices, of retreats from decisiveness, of allowing issues to be obfuscated by sensitivity to the opinions of others. God reprieved daughter Hannah in order to give him another chance, and when he failed to take it, confiscated baby Judith instead. Sewall's lack of firmness created a kind of aperture in the tissue of things, through which his poor defenceless baby fell.

Fourteen months after Judith's death, Mary was born. Already she has survived for two months, and still shows no signs of illness or pining away. Sewall named her for Jesus's mother in the hope that by invoking that imperishable womb he can ensure that his daughter has come out of Hannah's without carrying within her some secret malady, and that her own tiny womb will grow to adulthood and nurture babies in its turn.

Now, on Christmas Day 1691, Samuel Sewall kneels on his study floor while snowflakes fall past the window and around his house a pale and silent Boston goes about its daily business, and he prays that God will send him a sign that he has been forgiven for his weaknesses.

Suddenly there's a hubbub downstairs and then the door bursts open. He looks up startled from his devotions. Betty is there, panting and wide-eyed. She gulps with excitement before she manages to speak. ‘Father,' she announces, ‘the house is on fire!'

Sewall struggles to his feet, conscious of his awkward bulk, while his little girl, neat as a fish, spins round and runs back down the stairs again. He cries out after her, terrified that she might be heading back into an inferno, ‘Elizabeth, Elizabeth!' (using her full name in this extremity, since God must be listening) while he descends into the smoke. His whole household seems to be in the main room, crisscrossing like ships in a fog. He blunders through them.

‘It's just the chimney on fire,' says his wife's voice. ‘Calm yourself, my dear.'

‘I thought—,' he says wildly, ‘—are the children—?'

‘Everyone is fine. Baby is with her nurse. I expect she's still sleeping.'

His voice chokes up. He had thought Betty was about to be taken from him, for his continued sins. He had thought that was the sign. But here she is, admiring the blazing hearth. He pretends he has a cough, caused by the smoke.

‘Father, must we run outside?' Betty asks him joyously. Hearing her question Joseph lets out a kind of Indian war whoop.

'Will the house burn down?' young Hannah asks. Unlike her brother and sister she is frightened.

The hearth is a sheet of flame, and smoke is curling down from the chimney, but just at this moment along comes Bastian with a pan of water drawn from the hogshead that stands by the kitchen door (as per order of the Court of Assistants) in case of just this sort of emergency. ‘No,' Sewall tells her, ‘Bastian will save the day.'

‘Your pork is the culprit,' his wife points out. ‘It dripped fat into the flames.'

Suddenly he feels in control. ‘Children,' he announces magisterially, ‘when you remove the cause, you eradicate the effect.' He wraps a handkerchief around his hand and lifts the spit from its rest, holding it aloft like a spear. The leg of pork, still skewered, is blackened and now looks as if it came from a smaller pig altogether. As soon as he has accomplished this, Bastian flings his pan of water.

Sewall heads towards the kitchen like a standard-bearer, his family following him, clouds of steam from the hissing hearth following them. He puts the spit down on the table top and uses a poker to push the pork from it. Then he takes a knife and cuts a slice off the end. Within a black circle the meat looks well-cooked but eatable. ‘We shall make a good dinner of this after all,' he announces.