Her Kind, a novel (8 page)

Not everyone arrived in Iowa by crossing the river.

Some had perhaps already been north or south and they simply kept making their way to somewhere until they came upon the village of Parkhurst and decided it was home.

Fill up Iowa!
the poster back east had read.

The great river offered a natural boundary between civilization, better known as Illinois, and wide open prairies that would eventually be parceled into acres, sections, and quarters.

Iowa.

The posters had demanded it. Propaganda that misrepresented the harsh, bitter winters and the legions of drifts that were only stopped by barns, granaries and chicken houses that took years to erect and offered little to protect from a chilling wind that bit bone and tooth.

Wood-frame out buildings rotted in wet springs and then hard-baked by a summer heat only to stand proud against the next onslaught of a winter gale.

A few were surprised. Others knew it was better from whence they had come and no cold wind would blow them back.

Once, when I was twelve and had things pretty well sorted through by then, Grandpa Syl found me walking the Parkhurst cemetery alone to see that limestone set deep in the hill. Standing at a marker of one word.

BABY.

I am not sure if Grandpa Syl were speaking to me, but without looking up, I knew even then that I should listen.

Sometimes loss drives new meaning into gain.

Whether Asaph and Mary-Ann intended to be land barons or whether they simply needed more space between themselves and Parkhurst was anyone’s best guess. In becoming a Sargent, Mary-Ann relinquished the Condit name with a relief and removed herself from the river crossers.

Born here.

Native.

Yet, it was seeing her name scripted on those deeds by the county recorder that fed her continued appetite for land as much as those grabbers and squatters of Syl’s generation before her. She traced the boundaries of the LeClaire Township map with her worn, broken nail and underlined her name with an invisible line for emphasis.

That first time that Mary-Ann had pushed back on Asaph’s demands was the first time she found she could do so with no resistance or battle.

A door was open. One whole year as a prisoner of war in Nashville kept him shackled to hope for Island City. She had supported what he had wanted and now it was her turn.

No wonder he so loved the structure that rigid confines and sharp-mapped boundaries can bring to a woundedness no one else could fathom.

Pen to paper, Asaph had so swiftly signed the first contract with no opposition, no rebuke.

Mary-Ann Sargent.

Land owner.

It was like that for Uncle Asaph.

The river had tempered his soldier’s heart. Like the finest fishing line, stronger than its weight in borders.

Kept him in.

Kept him taut.

America’s greatest public execution,
I read somewhere later.

Duty.

Honor.

It was all good and right and just.

It is not God who determines a man’s heaven or hell, Grandpa Syl had explained to me once as he scoffed at Asaph’s desire to build an island city. Man’s, he had said.

It was in one of those solitary moments, somewhere around that same time that Grandpa Syl had died, that I sat on a roughhewn closet floor and cried over a painting, not only for these 38 hooded souls, but also for Asaph and his regiment.

A young blue soldier.

Exterminator.

It would be the 76 dangling legs at 5 after 10 that invaded my mind for years after.

Mrs. Arthur once told the whole class that my uncle had been a war hero. She had beamed at me so directly as if silently commanding me to beam back with a similar aura. My face and mind only responded with a deadness more typical of Emma than me.

We line the river bank, and Jesus washes us clean.

Zenas had proclaimed this when he saw the great river for the first time.

God forbid that it be so simple.

The river seems high today.

When they began to lay the wing dams, we all had a good laugh. Yet, we had laughed less years later at the lock and dams because they had put so many men to work that needed the work so badly, and the river had simply claimed too much by then.

Grandpa Syl would have laughed over the Corps’ attempt to tame the great river.

A guaranteed channel.

Reliable avenue.

Don’t respect it, and you won’t forget the whoopin’.

He would have howled. Yet, he would have mourned just as much in his soft tough way as we helped our downriver neighbors to higher ground in the year of the great flood and those that had settled nearer the Wapsi as they lost their history to river silt and its lingering drudge.

That summer it rained and rained and rained, but Asaph would not leave his city. Little Syl vacated his home and moved his young family into dry Parkhurst. He threw up his arms at his father as the crest was only a fantasy and days and days away. He finally retreated from battle as he could not break through what he thought was a deafness, stubbornness and idiocy.

Hell or high water!

Old fool.

Eventually, the Treats and a small group of others departed the families in Watertown and crossed the Connecticut River to establish the village of Glastenbury.

Eventually they would give in and correct the spelling to its namesake, the first church in England, but Mary Johnson was not to be among them.

Dorothy Bulkeley Treat would never know of her husband’s lost aunt. Dorothy had been born the year after the group who had crossed the river signed the act of incorporation, and proclamated themselves as separate and distinct from Watertown. By the time she named her youngest daughter, Mary, in 1709, it was well understood who her daughter’s great-aunt had been.

After all, it was a matter of record.

A freed prisoner still carries the stigma of accusation. The suspicion of wrong-doing is a stain in itself. The shame of potential future wrongs.

A bad seed in any light.

She was not to be trusted.

They would say this to her grave.

Dorothy’s opportunities were unique among all women outside of Concord. For all of the new England for that matter. Her father would come to teach her more than any woman should have known about the world of the unseen. Yet, he also overtly saw to it that she would never be called a witch, and a medical professional she became by wit and by blood.

When Mary Johnson had first heard what the men had proposed for the name of the new village, the old weakness descended over her like a shroud as if she still sat jailed on the dirt floor in Watertown.

The news had less impact due to the years that had allowed her to separate from the dank, dark walls of the alms house and the narrow walkway to Magdalen chapel, but the wood confines of the jailhouse had superseded those more peaceful days of solitary.

Public ridicule is always more painful than the distancing from family. The silence of an unspoken shame still manifests in all sorts of odd ways.

This was not a place she would ever go and, yet, she settled into surviving her days in Watertown, shunned by her own children. Loved by a foolish man who looked beyond her soil.

A lost soul.

Other than that short walk to speak no words with Rev. Bulkeley, she had not been allowed to leave the wooden confines.

Never even allowed to see her own daughters!

The last witch trial in Watertown had been in 1648 and Glastenbury was never to have a single one. The Reverend ensured both outcomes. The king’s surgeon had certain influence and had helped the judges to see that unless there were at least two witnesses to each alleged event, then the event had not occurred.

A simple arithmetic. Reasonable and fair justice that could only be argued by a man.

The cleverness of the Reverend’s logic was indisputable for many of the alleged incidents had been witnessed by lone individuals, many who were short-sighted women, so prone to error, they had posited.

The Reverend’s argument had been very persuasive and Mary Johnson was not to be executed.

The governor and the Reverend had an alliance that was bound by the royal society of alchemy and with the Reverend’s wife a descendent of Charlemagne. Well, all the better for rational decisions. All his borne gifts would thus secure his lifelong position and allow him to aid in the continued abatement of ignorance and fear.

The two-fold shield of religion and healing. The fear of death and the hereafter influenced many a villager.

It’s a time of need for reasonableness, rationality.

The governor had told him.

Bring these villages out of their hysteria or we may never be seen as worthy of making our own decisions.

He had appealed to the right man.

The Reverend may have been a loyalist, but that did not stop him from noting each new and full moon, solstice, equinox in his monthly log. Pagan practices he would have otherwise condemned coming from a woman, but they had been long part of a motherland holy ritual that these colonists would never understand.

Literally incapable.

As a cleric-physician, he could be a man of science and religion simultaneously. No one questioned which discipline he drew from in any scenario. If a child was ill, they needed their doctor and probably needed their cleric as well. No one would argue theology on their child’s sick bed.

He was the ideal blend of his passions and he lived in a time when he did not have to choose. So he alone decided for his daughter.

Dorothy pursued the arts taught by her father, but only after he died. Like all good puritans, he suffered from
misoginia
throughout his lifetime, but could not bring himself to view his own daughter with the same level of disdain.

His departing gift to her was a bequeath of equity unlike any physical property and money. In spite of all the years he preached for the godly obedience of woman as subservient to the men who lead them, their fathers and husbands, he left his daughter to think for herself.

Subservience can only lead to subversion.

He taught her these truths in private as if she were a boy and knew full well it could only be done after it was too late to do different. He would leave his library to his daughter and let her read for herself. To decipher royal society secrets never intended for the eyes nor faulty intellect of a female.

If there was payment for this in the afterlife, he would reconcile it there.

A library!

The barrister stopped briefly during the reading of the will as Dorothy exhaled the words in a moment of lost composure.

He paused politely as she nodded using the starched cotton to cover her shocked open lips, feigning an exultation of grief.

By then she was Dorothy Bulkeley Treat, having entwined the Treats and Bulkeleys in marriage to create the line that would find its way to create the middle land.

You would have made grandfather proud.

The second Rev. Treat told his son at the wedding held in the same year the official Glastenbury was born and years after the ancestor, born in Taunton, christened in Pitminster, and buried at Naubuc bargained away from Sowheag for 12 yards of cloth. No deed was ever found.

The legacy carried on from the blood of an Englishman turned emigrant proprietor. The new propriety.

His father was never to see his grandson, departing the year of the wedding, a grandson who was donned still yet another Rev. Richard Treat, one who had sealed the lineage of the Bulkeley arms and joined another Connecticut puritan line, the Woodbridges with their Yale heritage, and delivered one more Richard Treat, a junior; thereafter, naming his first son.

Ashbel Woodbridge Treat.

A Charlemagne-Bulkeley-Woodbridge-Treat, the ultimate puritan. Almost royalty back east, but meant little here.

My great-grandfather.

Father of Grandma Laura.

My father’s mother.

Son of an excellent stock.