Her Kind, a novel (9 page)

It was the way back east in the Treat family that male children were named for their predecessors.

Paternal grandfather first names were often honored as a first born grandson’s second given name as no one wanted to pass down the onerous responsibility of living up to the generation that had crossed an ocean or a river by saddling them with the forefather’s given name that had led to a new era.

The paternal surname would eventually be enough.

The English days of naming daughters for their mothers were long gone. Instead, mothers’ maiden names often found their way as the second son’s second given name. Father’s given names were usually the last choice and offered as a second given name to those blessed with a third or fourth son, although some rebellious son-in-laws may have pounced first to use it as the first name of a third or fourth son of his daughter, if the daughter were fortunate enough to gain such recognition from her father.

By our century, some grandparents would silently concede that a son-in-law had been in the family long enough to have earned this right.

In our parents’ century, the new territory often forever burdened female children with their mother’s names as their second given name.

This was my honor as Rose Emma Parmlee. Emma for my mother, although a mother I would never become to pass on the ridiculous tradition.

Please use no abbreviations and no pet names on the Parmlee mausoleum this time. Someone please tell the engraver to offer my full name.

Please carve it accurately:
Rose Emma Parmlee.

It is all I ask in the end.

Let them know it was I who had been here.

They had been awakened.

It was not Yale nor Harvard. It was our heritage and Grandma Laura never let us forget that we as Henry’s children had one-quarter Woodbridge-Treat blood in us. We were as much Woodbridge-Treat as Parmlee.

Richard Treat and Aaron Burr had sat at the same table, she would remind us.

She would never come to know all that I knew of the Condit side. More than one quarter. Closer to one-third in my estimation.

But no one knew, so it mattered little to anyone but to me.

I relish my imaginings of what Zenas would have done had he known that his presbytery roots lay at the heart of the great awakening. How he would have pumped his chest, projected his voice, had he only known that his mother’s ancestor had been Richard Treat, founded Princeton, sat at the table with Burr and determined the course of his own Ten-Mile church.

Oh, how Grandma Laura would have argued this fact!

Do not disagree!

It was the red and gold altar cloth,

I see it now, red for Pentecost, red for the fire that burned unclean within me.

The Condit Bible was always kept on the lower shelf of the book pedestal behind two small doors. It was the only possession retrieved after the ice crossing, when Grandpa Syl had gone back to the wagon and found it ransacked, almost empty.

Yet, the thieves had left the bookstand, probably because it was too heavy to carry away and the door within its base had been locked.

I can remember the day that I had found a key slot in the platform and had opened those lower shelf doors. I had felt like a burglar, a criminal, but had convinced myself that it was mine to read. It was my own history, after all!

I can even remember how low the sky had felt that afternoon when Mary had taken Lillie May with her to check on Mrs. Parkhurst who had taken ill.

I felt as if Grandpa Syl was looking over my shoulder and ready for a reprimand as I removed the immense and fragile leather from the shelf.

Perhaps I was meant to understand.

I knew immediately that it had to be Grandma Laura’s Rev. Treat because someone had printed off to the right of his name:
the emigrant - Somerset to Watertown.

Even then I knew the difference between emigrant and immigrant.

I knew there would be no reprimand. Perhaps Syl had always known what lay behind this locked door.

And that a key existed.

In an ancient chapel in the center of the small village, a baby cried. The precious sound awoke even those dying within the stone walls of the almshouses that lined the street in front of infirmary hall.

The rejection had come slowly for Mary Treat and most of the actual story she was never told.

Likely it was because she was from a good family and good families did not have daughters like Mary. There was no defining moment where she felt the shift from girl to woman. In contrast, the moment of dysfunction came quite suddenly and as quite a surprise.

Whore.

Harlot.

Witch.

There was still little tolerance for illegal fornication and the terms used to label female perpetrators had for too long been synonymous with those in alliance with the devil.

Not too often was a woman branded a strumpet that witch did not follow very soon thereafter out of the mouth of one good village man or woman or another. Promiscuity had been the consort’s temptress and seducer of men since Jezebel and Delilah, and Mary had likely been a fourteen-year-old apostate preying on the human weakness of an otherwise godly Mr. Clerke. Especially when the clandestine was on holy ground–the parish graveyard was soiled by this evil encounter. The western circuit judge declared it had been, and the Reverend had even agreed with him. Mr. Clerke’s charges of adultery were expeditiously dismissed and he returned to his faithful wife and children.

Children of these dalliances paid the greater price for the put-upon shame of silent glances; or even worse, the look-away whispers from the adults around them. At least other children were a bit more direct with their lancettes. Yet, the wounded child could never be the victor, so a solution had to be sought by the Treats in a plea to the Bishop. For there was nothing else to be done.

The Hammer had set the agenda for any investigation and was in arm’s reach of this judge, but with no direct accusers and no desire or time to induce a confession, Mary’s crime was conferred simply: illegal fornication. Yet, the punishment was never rendered as the vicar intervened on behalf of the family, and since Mary held no property nor was entitled to that of her father, the court agreed.

The argument was sound.

Consequently, she was taken to the site of the first abbey for she could not remain in the village almshouses. Although it was considered for a day, the Reverend finally said no. So instead, it was to be the site of the Lord’s Mother’s first church, now the monk’s infirmary, where the poor and elderly men of that parish could find food and a place to rest. There, Mary was banished to the confines of motherly love that could and would cure her of her freewill.

As Mary was cloistered on the inside of the infirmary, she worked off her penance by cooking and then dutifully serving the meals through the small wooden window. She patched their clothing in the afternoons, and handed over the blue and white chipped bowls to the worn men as they lined up for meals. She was not allowed to deliver meals inside the almshouses to those most ill, but instead handed them over to the healthiest who maintained the task.

She may have been spared from execution, but not persecution. She knew her growing belly was her only salvation. Retribution was still necessary, of course, and extolled daily by Mary’s own hand in the exile of her sparse room.

Her letters would arrive at Taunton Manor, delivered by a benevolent parishioner who delivered provisions to the infirmary once a month.

Regret torments me, Mother, as I stoke the fire in this place within me that I can now make hurt on my demand.

Shards, sticks, slivers are easily within reach

I use them all to pierce, prod and poke

Seeing the blood brings me some comfort.

Why did you take the baby, but not me?

When may I come home?

What to do. What to do. What to do. If only he had not taught her to write!

Mary’s mother would pace the floors while the Reverend slept, never daring to speak of their daughter’s letters (and certainly not her agony) to him who would only dismiss it with a wave.

Maudlin for a magdalen.

He would shout this in his odd way that no one quite wanted to hear.

Then, finally, the letter arrived that had quite literally answered her mother’s prayers.

There would be no farewells when Mary was sold as a bride and set sail for the new world where she would meet her obligation—indentured for seven years to a husband’s family in exchange for her passage. Her daughter was raised by the forthright grandparents who told the child when she turned four that her mother had died like an angel to bring her to them. For they were tired of the asking and wanted to be sure to tell her before someone else did.

What else was there to do?

The village talked of the disgrace for years to come, especially any time the Reverend’s granddaughter was mentioned or a parishioner did not like his sermonizing. They knew well the mother been placed on a ship to seek further ill. Forgotten, but for the rumors that grew over the years.

A bad seed, they said, never produces fruit.

The girl was better off without her.

When the wind blew the opposite direction of the current, Grandpa Syl used to say the river was going against its own nature. He would point out from his rocker on the porch facing the deep dark water, the darkest ripples over its deepest pockets.

Whose will is stronger?

I once thought this was his way to test me, but later realized I was no more than a sounding board for his own Zenas-trait, a need to hear his own voice rather than mine.

As much as Grandpa Syl was a teacher, Grandpa Moses was a storyteller. He would use stories of the natives to scare us into obedience. The fear quickly dissipated when Grandma Laura would walk in the room and say quietly,
We stand on their shoulders, Moses.

Moses would ignore her, of course, and then continue on to wield his verbal weapon, searing us with tales of rampages, hostages, and scalps.

Harry would wail, then cover his mouth, cringing in the parlor corner, horrified. Annie would cringe with him, and I would remain seated on the ottoman, my ever studious self, as if this were simply another of Moses’ lectures on east versus west, north versus south. There was always a battle line drawn somewhere in his story, and we, the obedient Parmlee children (the ones who had lived), were always on the good side.

The side of
right.

Yet, somehow, I had listened more to Grandma Laura’s voice on that particular afternoon. So much so that I would letter relate the same statement to my Sunday students at First Presbyterian, but would never have dared such an utterance at District 14. Public school, even then, was no place for diverse public opinion. Our textbook had said otherwise:
the government had been so good to savages, bringing them civility, education, and religion.

We were never to learn the reasons behind Grandpa Moses’ need to deify himself and use stories of natives to instill old fears in the midst of cultivated farmland long expunged of those who had once farmed it for themselves.

Grandma Laura’s conversations on the matter were more private. They remained back east and left only to our imaginings.