Embracing Darkness (2 page)

“But how will you speak to them if their ear is not to the ground as was mine?”

“I will bring them to you.” replied Wanom-keea-po-da.

Suddenly, the entire ground around Kerawana began to tremble. She leaped up and watched the dark ground as it shifted to and fro. She lost her balance and fell down onto the forest floor. Then she heard the voice of a man calling.

“Cooooooo!”

She could tell the voice was close.

“Cooooooo!”

Kerawana followed the voice. Within minutes, she spotted the owner of that voice, and although it was too dark for her to see his face, she could tell he was no animal, nor was he the wendigo.

“HELP!” she cried.

The man jerked his head and saw the outline of Kerawana’s shapely body before him. He ran to her. He asked her if she was alright, but before Kerawana could respond, she fainted. The fright from the past several hours was more than she could take.

When she awoke the next morning, she noticed that she was lying on a pile of soft blankets. The head of the man who had found her the night before was hanging over her. He appeared to be only slightly older than she, and he was very handsome; the most handsome man she had ever laid eyes upon.

“My name is Pentautuwuck.”

“I am Kerawana. How… How did you find me?”

“Strange. I was walking back to my village from a late night hunt. The land began to shake under my feet, and every time I tried walking north, west and east, it grew more powerful. It was only when I turned to walk south that it stopped.”

“I still felt it, even when I saw you.” said Kerawana.

“As I said,” replied Pentautuwuck, “strange.”

Pentautuwuck helped Kerawana to her feet, and the two journeyed back towards her village, for Pentautuwuck knew the way, as his father had taught him as a boy how to get to the five closest neighboring villages. The two spoke the entire length of the journey, and realizing how much they had in common, quickly fell in love.

Finally, they reached Kerawana’s village nearing the end of the light of day. But Kerawana’s father, Penaushiwa, sick with grief over the disappearance of his daughter, flew into a rage when he saw her standing before him, holding hands with a strange man.

“Father. This is Pentautuwuck, and he rescued me from the wilds of the woods. Would you have your daughter dead and fed on by the animals, or would you have her home again, safe, and in the bosom of her family?”

It was then that Penaushiwa swore to kill Pentautuwuck and Kerawana for their amour. The two ran as fast as they could back into the forest. They ran southward for days and days, until finally they came to a clearing. They knew that Penaushiwa was close behind them. With nowhere to hide in the open field, the two were resigned to dying.

Just then, they heard a voice call out from above. It sounded deep, wise and ancient.

“You will never be safe.” said the voice. “Penaushiwa will hunt you down until he finds and kills the both of you. Otherwise
you
must take him down.”

“Oh!” replied Kerawana. “I could never kill my own father.” Then she looked towards Pentautuwuck. “And I could never love any man who killed him either. Oh, please, Kisosen! Sun God of the Abenaki! Surely you can help us!”

“Perhaps there is a way. But it would mean giving up everything you knew before.”

“We’ve already lost that, great Sun Deity.” replied Pentautuwuck.

Just then, a rumble was heard in the distance, and within seconds, the earth around Kerawana and Pentautuwuck began to shake violently. It was Wanom-keea-po-da, angered that Kerawana had forgotten her promise to him. Kisosen acted quickly, transforming Pentautuwuck into a large hill, on top of which no tremor could reach. Then the sun god transformed Kerawana into a large and beautiful maple tree, and placed her on the hill.

Feeling betrayed by Kerawana, as she would now never give birth to any child whose blood could be spilt, the subterranean spirit went in search of Kerawana’s father.

After days of fruitless searching, Penaushiwa laid down his arms for a few minutes to rest. Within moments, he was asleep; his ear pressed against the earth. He was immediately awakened by a strange voice that sounded as if a fire were speaking to him, such as snaps and crackles that kindling makes in a blaze.

“Penaushiwa.” the voice gargled, and Penaushiwa slowly opened his eyes.

Within minutes, he was on the hunt again. He followed the tremors on the ground, just as Wanom-keea-po-da had instructed him to. By the time the sun was midway in the sky, Penaushiwa cleared the forest and the quaking below his feet ceased. Again, he put his ear to the ground to seek instructions from Wanom-keea-po-da, who told him what Kisosen had done for the two lovers.

Brave in every way except one, Penaushiwa told Wanom-keea-po-da that he could not climb the hill, for he had always been frightened of heights. Wanom-keea-po-da reacted violently, and all the land shook violently. A distant cry could be heard by Penaushiwa, and he wasn’t sure if it was the wendigo, or the jaded and vengeful spirit below the earth.

As he turned around to go back to his village, Penaushiwa shouted to the majestic-looking hill with its splendid maple tree perched on top. He swore everlasting revenge on his daughter and her lover, and that they would never be safe. Citing Wanom-keea-po-da’s own defeat at Kerawana’s betrayal, Penaushiwa called upon the subterranean spirit to keep watch over the maple and the hill; and that if Kisosen’s spell ever wore off, or if the two lovers thought it safe to come out of hiding, that Wanom-keea-po-da would kill the both of them.

Kisosen heard all this and decided to bless the tree with eternal life, and swore to Kerawana and Pentautuwuck that they would live forever as long as they stayed the way they were. And to this day, neither the hill nor the maple has ever broken that spell.

BOOK I
St. Andrew’s
 

ONE
A Brief History
 

I am often haunted by my memories of the Benson Home for Abused and Abandoned Boys. The fragmented pieces of an injured childhood have left what little remains of my life in ruins, yet I’ll not make what I’m about to tell you about
me
. Not at all. In fact, that which I feel compelled to express on paper isn’t autobiographical whatsoever; and although it takes place in the town of my birth, none of my kin are involved.

What’s more, born and raised a strict Congregationalist, I find that my faith here takes a back seat to everything involved. In other words, my story is the story of
others
. All that occurs, you see, are events that I’ve researched. Some of those involved are simply people whom I once knew; others, people I just heard of; and a few, ones I feared.

Imagination and wonder are truly remarkable. Some say the two go hand in hand. Perhaps so, but wonder does lead to many things. It opens doors, huge floodgates of supposition. A powerful thing, surely, to be able to search one’s memory and wonder how the whole world could be different, or even to wonder about everything that exists within the confines of one’s own small town.

I wonder a lot.

I wonder how, had I chosen a different path, my life would have been. I wonder whether the mistakes I made, both during my stay at the Benson Home for Abused and Abandoned Boys and afterwards in adulthood, could have been avoided had I done things differently.

I wonder what children who are like I once was—abused, beaten, and neglected—become once they reach adulthood. Do we necessarily become like our parents? Is the abused always destined to become the abuser? Or do we become something worse?

I wonder too whether I can answer such questions. Isn’t the first step to self-improvement admitting to yourself and to others that you have a problem? I know all too well what my wife and children think of me. I’ve made mistakes. I acknowledge that. God only knows how many mistakes I’ve made. And I’m paying for them every day.

I wonder why I ever became a writer in the first place. Was it so that I could relive the pain of remembering over and over as I transfer my reality into fiction? Was the decision a way to torture myself as a means of atonement? Some people become alcoholics or drug addicts to hurt themselves on purpose because of self-hate. Do
I
hate myself?

I do not wonder why I’ve finally chosen to write this story. I desperately wanted to tell it, even though it was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. It took me years to drum up the courage. The research has steered me all over the country and consumed two years of my life. I had to investigate whatever needed to be found out to get the story right. The interviews were many; the disappointments and doors slammed in my face were even more. However, I vowed not to give up until I got everything down for a fair and accurate account of what occurred in Holly, New Hampshire, between 1925 and 1942.

What would it have been like had Father Phineas Poole not been asked to take over the Parish of St. Andrew’s in the spring of 1925? Would the small Roman Catholic population of the town have grown substantially or decreased dramatically? Would the troubled youth of Rockingham County have been better off with indifferent foster families, or would such children have benefited more from a state-run institution whose bureaucracy would neglect these lost souls far worse than any private citizen ever could?

Wondering becomes complicated. That’s why I stopped asking myself questions that were too complex to answer. Instead, I concentrated on only one:
Would
things
ever
be
as
close
to
normal
again
as
they
were
in
Holly
before
the
arrival
of
the
new
priest?

St. Andrew’s Roman Catholic Church was nothing spectacular, but then again neither was Holly. It was as close to a normal, small New England town as anyone could hope to find at that time. It had been established in 1640, shortly after Reverend John Wheelwright and his followers arrived, courtesy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, today known as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Wheelwright had been exiled for rather inflammatory religious opinions that he shared with Anne Hutchinson, his sister by marriage. His other sin was that he robbed the land in and around what would become Holly, land that had once belonged to the Squamscott Indians.

Being a man of the cloth
,
one would presume that Reverend Wheelwright treated the natives fairly, giving them more than the twenty-four dollars that the Dutchman, Peter Minuit, had paid for Manhattan Island only twelve years earlier. Yet who am I to say how their business transpired? There isn’t much in our local history books to shed enough light on whether or not Wheelwright acted magnanimously or miserly.

I suppose this speculation is irrelevant, since it’s more astonishing to me that Holly was even founded at all. Even though it was hundreds of years ago, folks around town still hold to the legend that, when Reverend Wheelwright came through this territory on his way to establish Exeter, he passed a great spread of land. What made him choose to press on was not that he thought the land impossible to irrigate for farming, but the presence of one thing he called a “monstrosity
.
” Onward they continued, or at least most of the party did. A few of the nearly 200 souls he had taken with him asked to remain behind. They liked the land and thought Wheelwright’s “monstrosity” actually quite pleasant to look at.

This geological structure known as a drumlin, formed by receding glaciers thousands of years ago, was indeed an amazing sight, bulging out in the middle of the flattest of flat land. Being a small-to-average size for a drumlin, it still looked immense to the human eye, yet its summit reached only eighty feet. From one side to the other, it spanned approximately 3,000 feet, looking like the back of a whale slowly emerging from the earth. The 1,200-foot ascent to its peak from its gentlest slope of four degrees made it not too difficult to climb and offered a much more pleasant view from its apex than from the bottom.

“Climbing the beast,” as the locals used to say, was avoided in the beginning, with the first settlers ignoring its existence. Often it was Holly’s children who would call attention to the hill, periodically gawking at it. After a while some started asking their parents whether they could go climb it. They would say things like, “Perhaps we can see the ocean from the top!” and “Maybe a giant lives up there!”

Old Mrs. Kingood would relate stories that she had heard when she was a child. Dr. Hapscotch, the town physician back in the early 1800s, was the first to deem the hill a blessing. It was, as he always put it, “a way for lazy people to go out and do their bodies some good for a change.” He’d always said that Holly had more than its share of corpulent people. Before the doctor went public with his approval of the hill, not one soul had ever climbed it, which was a shame because the top offered a splendidly picturesque and panoramic view of the land below. From the summit could be seen miles and miles of flat farmland, dirt roads, cows grazing in the distance, a house here and there, a thin blue line in the distance, signifying where New Hampshire’s coast met the vast Atlantic, and of course, directly down the hill, the cluster of small buildings and streets that made up the town of Holly.

Silas Rosgrove and Cletis Cartwell, two rather large gentlemen in their forties, and best friends, took the doctor’s advice and made their way up the hill on the first day of summer in 1822. Unfortunately their first attempt was their last. About halfway up the hill, with their bald heads getting sunburned and their eyes stinging from drops of sweat, Silas took out his handkerchief to wipe his forehead and, in doing so, accidentally pulled out an embroidered hanky with the initials “CC” on it. These initials were not Cletis’s but rather his wife’s. Clarissa Cartwell had been having an affair with Silas Rosgrove, and until that moment it was the best-kept secret in town.