Tooth and Claw (36 page)

What to say? That the crossing—eyes tight shut and her grip on the papery gunwales like the grip of death—was the single worst moment of her life, at least until the next crossing, through which they plunged in a pit of darkness so universal that it was only the tug of the reins, the murmur of the current and the sudden icy stab of the water at her calves to let her know she was in it and through it? Or that the fourteen miles remaining were so tedious she could scarcely stay awake and upright in the saddle despite the horripilating shivers that tossed her from one side to the other like a ball in a child’s game? Say it. And say that she thought she was dreaming when the Post sounded his horn and the snug, well-lit house of the Havenses materialized out of the night.

AT THE HAVENSES’

A
S WEARY AS SHE WAS
, as worn and dispirited, she couldn’t help feeling her soul rise up and shout when she stepped through the door. There was Mr. Havens, solicitous and stout, and Mrs. Havens beside him with a welcoming smile, the fire going hard in the hearth and a smell of beef broth to perfume the air. She saw immediately that these were people civil and clean, with a well-ordered house and every sign of a demanding mistress, a picture on one wall of the sitting room and a glass vase of dried flowers set atop an oiled sideboard on the other. Chairs were drawn up to the fire and a number of people cozily ensconced there with their mugs and pipes and they all had a greeting on their lips. Mrs. Havens helped her off with her riding clothes and hung them up to dry and then asked if she could get her anything by way of refreshment, Sarah answering that she had a portion of chocolate with her and wondered if she might have some milk heated in a pan. And then she was shown to her room—small but sufficient and tidy—and the door was shut and she felt as if she’d come through a storm and shipwreck and washed up safe.

She must have dozed, because she came back with a start when Mrs. Havens rapped at the door. “Yes?” Sarah called, and for a moment she didn’t know where she was.

A murmur from the other side of the door: “Your chocolate, Missus.”

The milk had been boiled with the chocolate in a clean brass kettle, and there was enough of it to give her three cups full. And there were corn cakes, still warm from the griddle. This was heaven, she was thinking, very heaven, dipping the cakes into the chocolate and warming her hands at the cup, but then the voices began to intrude. It seemed that her apartment, separated from the kitchen by a board partition, wasn’t quite as private as she’d supposed. Next door to her—just beyond that thin rumor of a wall—were three, or was it four, of the town’s topers, and all of them arguing a single point at once.

She listened, frozen on the starched white field of the bed, and she might as well have been right out there amongst them.

“No,” a voice declared, “that’s not it at all. Narragansett means ‘briar’ in the Indian language, and the patch of it was right out there on Peter Parker’s place, twenty feet high and more—”

“I beg to differ, but it was a spring here—and that’s where the country gets it name. Waters of a healing property, I’m told.”

“Yes? And where is it, then? Why aren’t you drinking the waters now—why aren’t we all?”

A scuffle of mugs, the scrape of chair legs. “But we are—only it’s been distilled out of cane.” Laughter rang out, there was a dull booming as fists pounded the tabletop, and then someone followed it up with a foul remark, in foul language.

And so it went, for what seemed like hours. Exhausted as she was, there was no hope of sleep as long as the rum held out, and she began to pray the keg would run dry, though she was a practical soul who’d never had the calling and she never expected her prayers to be answered since there were so many worthier than she calling on the same power at the same moment. But the voices next door grew thicker, as if they’d started chewing maple sap boiled to gum, and the argument settled into a faintly disputatious murmur and then finally a pure drugged intake and outlay of breath that formed the respiratory foundation of her dreams.

THE HAVENSES’ TO THE PAUKATAUG

T
HE NEXT KNOCK
came at four in the morning, black as pitch and no breakfast but what was portable, and here they were, back out on the road in the dark and cold, deep in the Narragansett country now, which to Sarah’s mind was just more of the same: the hard road, the shadowy trees and the reptatory murmur of the waters that were all running underfoot to gather in some terrible place ahead. “Narragansett,” she whispered to herself, as if it were an incantation, but she had to be forgiven if she couldn’t seem to muster much enthusiasm for the origins of the name.

They’d been joined at the Havenses’ by a French doctor, a slight
man with a limp and a disproportionate nose, whose name she couldn’t pronounce and whose accent made him difficult to understand, so that they were a party of three now for this leg of the journey. Not that it made a particle of difference, except that Nathan and the doctor rode on at such a furious pace as to leave her a mile and more behind, alone with her thoughts and whatever frights the unbroken wood might harbor. From time to time she’d spy them on a hill up ahead of her, waiting to see that she was still on the road and not lying murdered in a ditch, and then they’d tug at the reins again and vanish over the rise.

The Post had warned her that there was no accommodation or refreshment on this stretch of the road—no human habitation at all—for a full twenty-two miles, but as the morning wore on it seemed as if they’d gone a hundred miles before she saw the two figures poised on a ridge up ahead, looking back at her and pointing to a tight tourniquet of smoke in the distance. She’d been down on foot and leading her mount at that point, just to ease the soreness of her seat and thighs, but now she remounted with some effort and found her way to the source of the smoke: an ordinary set down beside a brook in a clearing of the trees.

Painfully she dismounted and painfully accepted the refreshment the landlady had to offer—stewed meat and Indian bread, unleavened—and then sat over the journal she’d determined to keep while the landlady went on to the doctor about her physical complaints in a voice loud enough to be heard all the way to Kingston town and back. The woman spoke of her privates as if they were public, and perhaps they were, but just hearing it was enough to turn Sarah’s stomach and she had to take her book and sit out in the courtyard amongst the flies, which were especially thick here, as if they’d gathered for some sort of convention. She sat on a stump and swatted and shooed and blotted her precious paper with the effort until the Frenchman and the Post, still chewing a cud of stewed meat, saddled up and moved on down the road, and she had no choice but to rouse herself and follow on in their wake.

The country was unremarkable, the road boggy, the sun an affliction.
Her hands and face were burned where they were exposed and the pain of it was like being freshly slapped every ten seconds. She saw a pair of foxes and what might have been a wolf, loping and rangy, with something dangling from its jaws. The sight of it gave her a start, but the thing ignored her and went about its business, which was slipping into a ravine with its prey in order to feed in some dark den, and then she almost wished it would emerge round the next bend to attack her, if only to put an end to the ceaseless swaying and battering of the horse beneath her. Nothing of the sort happened, however, and at around one in the afternoon she found Post and doctor waiting for her on the shores of a broad tidal river she knew she would never get across, not in this lifetime.

AT THE PAUKATAUG

“W
ELL
,
THE ROAD ENDS
here, then, Missus, because the doctor has his business in Kingston town and I’ve got the letters to deliver.” The Post was leaning across his saddle, giving her a look of indifference. He was going to desert her and it didn’t bother him a whit.

The doctor said something then about the ebbing tide, but she couldn’t quite fathom what he was getting at until Nathan translated: “He says it’s easier crossing at low tide—”

“Well, when is that, pray?”

“Three hour. Maybe more.”

“And you won’t wait?”

Neither man spoke. They were both of them like the boys she used to teach at school, caught out at something—doing wrong and knowing it—but unequal to admitting it. She felt her jaws clench. “You’d desert me, then?”

It took a moment, and then Nathan pointed an insolent finger at what at first she’d taken to be a heap of flood-run brush, but which she now saw was some sort of habitation. “Old Man Cotter lives there,” he said, and at the sound of his voice a great gray-winged bird rose out of the shallows at river’s edge and ascended like a kite on the currents of the air. “He’ll take you in.”

Stunned, she just sat there astride her horse and watched the Post and doctor slash into the current until the water was at their waists and all that was visible of their mounts were their heads and a flat sheen of pounding rump, and then she made her way to the ramshackle collection of weathered boards and knocked at the door. The old man who answered gave her a startled look, as if he’d never seen a woman before, or a lady at any rate, but she steeled herself, and trusting in human kindness, offered him a coin and asked if she might shelter with him until the tide drew off. Very slowly, as if it were coming from a long way off, the old man discovered a smile and then stood back and held the door open for her. She hesitated—the floor was bare earth and there were animal skins on the wall, the place as dank and cold as a cellar. She turned to look back at the river, but the Post and his companion were already gone and the day was blowing away to the east in a tatter of cloud. She stepped inside.

THE PAUKATAUG TO STONINGTOWN

T
HERE WAS A WIFE
inside that hut and two children, both girls and ill-favored, and the whole miserable family dressed in rags and deerskin, and no furniture but for the rounds of logs cut for stools, a bed with a glass bottle hanging at the head of it for what purpose she could only imagine (decoration?), an earthen cup, a pewter basin and a board supported on rough-cut props to serve as a table. The hearth was a crude array of blackened stone, and as Sarah stepped through the door the wife was just setting a few knots of wood to the flame. “I don’t mean to intrude,” she said, all the family’s starved blue eyes on her, “but I’ve been deserted here at the river and I don’t know what else to do—”

The wife looked down at her feet and murmured that she was welcome and could make herself at home and that they were very honored to have her. “Here,” she said, “you just sit here,” and she indicated the bed. After that, no one said a word, the girls slipping out the door as soon as they could and the old man responding to Sarah’s questions and observations (“It must be solitary out here” and “Do
you get into Stoningtown much?”) with a short sharp grunt of denial or affirmation. The dirt of the floor was pounded hard. The fire was meager. A draft flowed continuously through the gaps in the river-run boards that made the walls of the place. She was cold, hungry, tired, uncomfortable. She closed her eyes and endured.

When she opened them, there was a new person in the room. At first she took him to be a wild Indian because there was no stitch of civilized clothing about him, from his moccasins to his buckskin shirt and crude hat tanned with the fur of some creature still on it, but she gathered from the conversation—what little of it there was—that he was the son-in-law of the old man and woman and living off in the deeper wild in a hovel of his own with their daughter, also named Sarah. No introductions were made, and the man all but ignored her, till finally Mr. Cotter rose to his feet and said, “Well, the river’ll be down now and I expect it’s time you wanted to go, Missus.”

Sarah began to gather herself up, thanking them for their hospitality, such as it was, but then wondered aloud who was to escort her across the river? And beyond, on the road to Stoningtown?

The old man gestured toward his son-in-law, who looked up at her now from out of the depths of his own cold blue eyes. “If you’d give him something, Missus, I’m sure George here could be persuaded.”

STONINGTOWN TO NEW LONDON FERRY

I
T WAS PAST DARK
when they limped into Stoningtown and her guide (no, he hadn’t murdered her along the road or robbed her or even offered up an uncivil remark, and she reminded herself the whole way not to judge people by their appearances, though she could hardly help herself) showed her to the Saxtons’, where she was to spend the night in the cleanest and most orderly house she’d yet seen since leaving Boston. Will Saxton was a kinsman on her mother’s side and he and his wife had been expecting her, and they
sat her before the fire and fed her till she could eat no more. Oysters, that was what she was to remember of Stoningtown, dripping from the sea and roasted over the coals till the shells popped open, and a lobster fish as long as her arm. And a featherbed she could sink into as if it were a snowdrift, if only the snow were a warm and comforting thing and not the particles of ice flung down out of the sky by a wrathful God.

She left at three the following afternoon—Thursday, her fourth day on the road—in the company of the Saxtons’ neighbor, Mr. Polly, and his daughter, Jemima, who looked to be fourteen or so. The road here was clear and dry but for the dull brown puddles that spotted the surface like a geographical pox, but they were easy enough to avoid and the weather was cool and fair with scarcely the breath of a breeze. They looked out to the sea and moved along at a reasonable rate—Mr. Polly, a man her own age and cultivated, a farmer and schoolmaster, setting a pace to accommodate his daughter. All went well for the first hour or so, and then the daughter—Jemima—began to complain.

The saddle was too hard for her. The horse was lame and couldn’t keep to a regular gait. She was bored. The countryside was ill-favored—or no, it wasn’t just ill-favored but what you’d expect to see on the outskirts of hell. Could she get down and walk now? For just a hundred yards? Her backside was broken. Couldn’t they stop? Couldn’t they buy that man’s farm over there and live in it for the rest of their lives?