Her Kind, a novel (13 page)

It was the
new
England.

Last names as first names, first names as last. There was a surprising freedom in declaring who you would be on this new shore, at least for the men anyway, as they signed the ship’s manifest with a new version of the prior signature.

An
e
replaced an
o
; an
i
to replace the
y.

Mary Treat carried the heaviest cargo to the settlement. Her modest baggage was outweighed by the heavy heart, cruelest to her sins that still haunted her when she was tired or let her mind sway and then it would sway the rest of her. But she planned to rid herself of this deposit as soon as her foot set on the shore. It was a new day after all, she told herself so again and again. New day. New life. New England.

Timber, timber, timber.

Move inland. Please. Move away from the cold harbor where mothers and brothers died in their arms, and they lost toes, fingers and hope.

For years in the new world, Mary thought she was the only one grasping. Clinging. Hanging on too tight. It was really the fear they all had carried with them. The pathetic, weak fear that took hold of the best parts of her resounding will that had survived that confined space, the suffocating walls that had been expanded to this boundlessness that other indentures called their sentence. Prisoners, we are, they had told her on the ship – those that she had dared converse with. Only the alms houses stone walls would ever again be a prison for her, stamping this so strongly in her mind that she began to wear a deep crevice mid-brow, a valley that had belied her youth.

No one in Watertown would know that the hard-working, strong-willed Mary Johnson had once been the unchaste Mary Treat, except of course, the Reverend Treat and his wife as they arrived one day to the Watertown colony and were aghast to see their daughter as a grown mother of three of her own: Prudence, Mercy and Hope. So named so perhaps her daughters would live out the sentiments she had missed. Greeting their granddaughters like strangers, the Treats held their sharp chins high and cold and Mary was only able to release her inner clapboarded sweet bitter thanks to the herbal balm from Goodwife Harrison. Hushed her, calmed her, actually soothed her, at least soothing the quaking in her knees.

No one knows here, she said silently. No one knows. Her mind raced with a fantasy of playacting, sin or not, she acted out the ideal scene in her mind. Could we not be long lost cousins? Could you not rush at me, sweep me up, embrace me? Claim me? At least show that we are connected? Are we not connected?

We are not connected.

It was foretold in the quickness of her mother’s glance away to avoid her direct gaze and jarred Mary out of this self-indulgent daydream. We were not connected as she herself diverted her gaze to her own feet, foreign they seemed in this moment, somewhat old. The old shame revisited with a full gale. It took a shudder of her shawl to squelch the urge to dash to the river and immerse herself in the dark water.

She looked over at her husband, Oliver, greeting the newcomers who had found their way, and somehow the courage to leave Barnstable and join the Connecticut purest of the pure. Oh, Oliver. If he only knew that his orphan virgin bride—paid for with an Atlantic passage—had actually been raised at Tauton Manor and had used all their credits with the bishop to salvage her pitiful and useless existence.

Have I returned my board, husband?

Thinking of yourself again?

The uninvited mind talk spanked her rudely back to hear the hearty and grandest greetings Oliver gave to these grandparents of his own daughters, soon to be wed themselves, never knowing they were the Harvard Treats of the bay colony. Only later she would be certain to tell the girls all the godly reasons for why confidence was not a sin and the strongest females bore males.

Hold your heads high! You will have sons!

But then, perhaps a moment of recognition! The youngest woman in the Treats’ party extended her hand to Mary Johnson and she allowed herself to connect in an intoxicating gaze with the daughter she would never know.

My name is Honour, she had said.

Fear is weak.

Truth cannot be unbroken, only untruth.

It is so oddly disturbing just when and where one is when memory finds its way to the mind’s eye. How can all of the good years not erase so few bad, Mary queried, holding her jaw tight, forcing the images of her grandchildren to override the mind, marching them through in the order of their birth, again and again, as she waited on the floor of a wood-framed cell this time. But the trick failed her since her daughters were now as ashamed of their mother as her own mother had been the day of her village arrival. Their faces blurred their children.

I want to see the prisoner.

Reverend Bulkeley ordered the jailer. He was so tired. Tired of these greedy self-appointed judges who so easily gathered this woman’s property up for distribution now that her husband was gone to garner it for themselves in the name of the law or redistribute to the deserving family. He had seen it in the commonwealth and now here it was again. The governor would help him see to it that no more women were racked and burned in the name of this ridiculous charade. Keep them from turning to the barbarism of rogue island was all the king’s agent had said. Do what you will, but keep them under the crown and we will continue your status in the royal society.

Mother says you find such relief in conflict, Oliver had once declared in a tone that bit her in that old place. She dared never to ask for clarification from the one man who had stood by her, in spite of his mother’s disapproval in his choice of a bride. Till his death from the pox, he stood by her. There were no balms for the pox, but Oliver was the one she could feel with her now.

At least she had that.
I see red
Circles of light
Weaving shards of sadness
Move along now
Moving through
Held too long
In that secret holding place
Too tight
Let go
Move through alone
It no longer belongs here.
Light a flame for the passing.
Holy, Mary Magdalen, pray for me.

The learned and privileged stoic men who had built Watertown did not always feel their daughters were capable of intellectual pursuits. It simply was not possible for their gender. Yet, in this case, the words were somehow dismissed as magic and blasphemy, so even more easily discounted.

Like the women in Solomon’s kingdom, if language served the lesser gender, they were somehow lost to demons.

Only the Wisdom could share words worthy of capture as
Psalms
and use a female pronoun as God. It was like the spirit of the sea, ethereal not corporal. Like the ignorant wordplay of children, puritan women were better kept silent.

Their gibberish meant nothing.

Three decades and Mary had just not learned. She had not changed in the new England any more than she had in the former. After all she had been through and she still could not keep her wicked thoughts to herself.

So, an actual witch or not, the punishment was just.

Rev. Treat, a pristine village elder with no shame upon him, once again tossed aside the words of his only daughter’s poetry when the jailer handed him what appeared to be a simple missive from the captive to her children.

Better off without her.

Words are things.

I see this truth so clearly now, but I had read this so long ago now. Was it Lord Byron? Grandma Laura would be so disappointed in me that I cannot now recall. My mind is slipping.

Words are the only connection I have here to reconstruct these memories and their relations. To make meaning of it all.

We are all connected. I am as sure of it now as Emma was.

Yet, for my sake, I must more than know it. I must make sense of it. I do not accept so easily what is told to me. This my downstairs captors know for sure.

Such beautiful instruments they have brought me to aid my hands in this final work, feigning ignorance to my writing. Capturing these things with graphite and linen allows me to bring them to the light in such a beautiful manner. Artistic.

Bring them out as I see them.

Where I can see them.

There is nothing left to fear now.

Perhaps, in the end, Zenas had it right after all.

They need to be put out.

Put down.

The things must be left behind.

I almost missed out on a secondary education much less a postsecondary one.

Girls are not equipped for higher learning.

I could only dream a frustrated dream of resistance, but thanks be to God and Grandpa Syl who encouraged me to read.

Yes, I could read.

And it had been Grandma Laura’s reading list that brought me through the threshold that only my grandmothers had imagined for me, reconstructed from their own lost futures when they headed west with their husbands and young children. Their own fathers had seen to that.

If Grandpa Moses had his way, my lot would have mirrored theirs and my mother’s.

Marriage.

Children.

Grandchildren.

These were to be the generational joys of life for women in my family. There was nothing more for which to be thankful or to yearn as long as you had your husband, your home, and your children.

Fortunately, Grandpa Syl had intervened.

For the first time ever, on any matter, he sided with Henry and defended his wishes to his daughter’s father-in-law on my behalf. This had never happened on property, boundaries, events. Only for me.

For Lord sakes!

Grandma Phoebe had unashamedly exclaimed to me and Emma. Although, of course, she knew Emma wasn’t listening, so perhaps her glee was for my ears only. Or perhaps her shouts over her daughter’s success may have perked an interest in the silent Emma, but it was not to be. Lighter words were all that piqued her mind these days—the blooming of the wild roses on the trellis beneath the river porch.

But a Condit girl to pursue a secondary education: not an inkling of acknowledgement nor word was spoken.

‘Tis not a
higher
education, simply a necessary one, Grandma Laura corrected her despite her agreement in the gloried news. She, too, had fought her husband on this one.

Pick your battles.

She had always advised me, and for this one, she had decidedly joined forces with Grandpa Syl.

The Condits and Parmlees in agreement was a phenomenon. It was a new day. One she knew she would likely pay for in these final years with her husband, but she cared not as her own retaliation would prevent it from becoming too severe.

I am a Treat. We teach our girls.

Grandma Laura had reminded them of this truth when only females were gathered in the kitchen, a rare gathering of the two families preparing a meal together that typically had never happened unless it were a birth, wedding, or a death.

I pondered on this significance and knew better than to think this was all about me and my attendance at Miss Ira’s School for Girls that fall.

Let the Parmlees do as they will, but this Treat grandchild will be educated beyond grade school, Grandma Laura boasted of the command she had given to Moses, but kept the actual coercive details to herself.

You cannot discount her potential. It is obvious to all of us.

I cried alone over this more than once as I had watched Harry graduate from the Davenport high school and then from the Iowa state college.

No Ivy League for the Iowa boy. A land grant college gave the first Condit-Parmlee, river crossers, to achieve this now or even before. So everyone thought.

Harry was better suited for higher education, for intellectual pursuits as Grandpa Moses termed them when he won the final battle as I graduated from Miss Ira’s and made my plans for Iowa college.

Of course, it sounded sweet, but it would not be.

Women were just not suited, I had been reminded.

I was 16 when Mrs. Collier handed me my diploma. I felt finally grown, but never doubted then that I would eventually marry, have children, enjoy my grandchildren.

Of course, that too, would not be.

Yet, my yearnings were never so tumultuous as when I read the
Gazette
and secretly cheered for those first women who attended the college. My secret sisters that kept me from looking aghast at what my own life had become.

Unmarried.

Head of household.

Spinster.

By 50, it was who and what I had become.

By 90, I am grateful.

It was only by women I had felt most judged for remaining this unmanaged, undesirable form of a woman.

Once my grandfathers and my father were gone, I had no man to direct my life. My decisions, to pay my taxes, my insurances, were mine. I alone directed the important decisions of my life and those of my sisters.

Yet, somehow, within, I never felt as unwanted as they would have had me believe.

Moses had tried to start a school once in Davenport when your father and his brothers were young, Grandma Laura confided in me one May day, years after it was very clear that I would not be on any path to formal higher learning. She shared the clipping from the
Gazette
that described the school that had lasted just one academic year.

The audacity.

Crossing rivers and prairies to become a farmer’s wife could never purge the Harvard-Yale-Princeton Woodbridge-Treat blood from her veins.

Land grants are for those who use their hands instead of their brains.

I had to smile with her.