Читать книгу Peace, My Daughters - Shirley Barker - Страница 4

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Because two people lie every night in bed together does not mean that they share a common life. Every soul is shut in its own world as in a square of glass; it may look out, as others may look in and observe it, but there is no blending, no touching of souls with each other or with a great all-soul. At least, it is not so in life, and when a man goes mad, this is the cause of it--that he can no longer stand the awful isolation of his own soul in its glass cell.

The waning moon of that November Eve shone through the diamond-shaped panes of Remember's bedroom, but she was not awake to see it; she slept troubledly. Her chestnut hair lay tumbled over the linen pillow and her breath came soft and even. Jonathan beside her was not awake either to delight in her loveliness. He lay, bunchy, limp, like a greatcoat worn but still serviceable, flung down, empty of its wearer. Now and then a gnarled arm struck out stiffly, as he dreamed of how he had felled the trees on the Governor's Orchard Farm forty years ago.

He was born in Salem in the fourth year of its settlement, and he still remembered his parents a little, but not the night when they had gone abroad in the Merrimack Country, and a party of Penacooks, wild at their first taste of rum, had made an orphan of him. Housed and fed by the neighbors until he was eleven years old, he went to work on Orchard Farm, helping to make land. After that, the time he dated his manhood from, his life was a clear road and he liked to think back over it. Out beyond the North Fields, between the Crane and Cowhouse River, the General Court had set aside a great acreage of land for the use of the Governor, and he, like a thrifty and industrious man--indeed, as the General Court had intended he should when they gave it to him--worked hard to clear it and make farms and meadowland out of wilderness. This work was some years under way by the time Jonathan Winster grew big enough to help at it; and since most of the activities a man might be called upon to perform in his life, from brewing to bridge-building, were carried on there, Orchard Farm was not only a great estate a-making, but a sort of agricultural academy where boys from all over the colony went to learn for themselves the uses land may be put to and how to create that land in the first place.

He had been an apprentice under Ben Scarlett, along with Nat Ingersoll and John Putnam, and as for the rest of it--they could have it. Nursing the apple trees, that is, treading down the roads, and cosseting the livestock. What he liked was to make land. They could have the plowing, too, and the seeding down, roofing the houses, and taking care of what was already finished and complete. He would be always going a little further along the swamp or the upland to prepare a place for them. To fell the trees in the spring, lifting the axe up into the blue air and making the chips fly, white and amber, like foam flakes from the prow of a cleaving ship! Swinging an axe and loving a woman--those were the times a man was a man. He wouldn't tell Parson about that last, though if someone didn't tell him, 'twas like he'd never know. The chips flew, and the great trees came down, and it gave you a fine feeling the first time you made your tree fall just where you planned it should. In the autumn you burnt them over, the old, thick trunks writhen like great snakes; trunks that had grown in the wood since the seven days of Creation, likely. You burnt them, and dragged what was left into piles and burnt them again. Then you sifted the seed in, corn and barley between the stumps and roots, till in time the fine, wiry plants sapped away the strength of the great ones. Finally you drove in the oxen, fastened hooks and chains to the crooked, evil stubs, and drew them out like rotten teeth. They could have it then! You were finished with it. Take up the broadaxe, and off to the far woods still spread west and north, where there were chips to fling up, white and amber, on the blue air.

Twenty-one years Jonathan had lived at Orchard Farm, and worked on it as lovingly as if it had been his own. When the old Governor lay dying he had called him in and given him a piece of it, a tidy piece on the south shore, set close to Salem Town, and the next year Jonathan built his own house and took a wife to keep it for him. When he grew restless there, long before her death which freed them both after eleven years of marriage, it was not because her frail beauty had been lost in bearing too many dead children. It was because he could not be happy where he must hold the plow to the same furrows year after year. He went off, then, to fight the Indians at Bloody Brook and Narragansett Fort where he came down twice, once with an arrow wound in his knee, once with a musket ball in his shoulder. The musket ball still lay there, embedded in the thickening flesh, and it seemed to grow heavier whenever he did a hard day's work; the surrounding muscles pained him when the east wind blew. He had seen Captain Lathrop die, full of arrows as a dog shot full of quills when the hedgehog turns on him; and come home to tell Bethia Lathrop, haltingly, how her husband had gone. He had come second only when John Raymond led the charge across Wickford Swamp--a good fighter, John, as all the Raymonds were.

Home from the wars, and a widower, Jonathan took two steps, the steps of a wise man. He married a pretty girl, and he traded his tame land for some wilder acres out along the spur of Hathorne's Hill where the men of Salem Farms were already forming their own parish, quite distinct from the opulent seaport that was Salem Town. Once again Jonathan swung his axe and was happy. One of the first felled trees went to make a cradle for his twin daughters, Prudence and Tamar. The same cradle served for their brother Neddy, born two years after them, but not born into Salem Village at all, into a world of his own, rather, for his blank, smiling eyes never changed with the changing colors of Salem weather, and his stumbling feet never strengthened and learned to run true, the way the twins ran. One of the last trees of Jonathan's felling made a coffin for his second wife. The embedded musket ball hurt him too much when he was chopping, shortened the down stroke, making the blow feeble and worthless. He cut no more trees after that, but he went looking for another pretty girl.

He found her up in Rowley that September in the house of Dan Wicom the weaver, and he married her just before Christmas, when the Great Comet that men would talk about for a century after hung burning and awful in the low sky. The thought that a woman might love as a man loved, or in a way of her own, had never come to him. By the time a woman was twenty or getting on for it, she wanted her own house and a family of children. His other wives had wanted that; this girl must want the same and he would give it to her. Remember had been a good wife since then, thrifty in the kitchen, pleasant to have in his chamber: the best of the three, probably--not answering his body like little, lost Mary buried on Orchard Farm. Somehow Remember's children never did get themselves born, but she was good to the girls and that poor Tom o' Bedlam child, Neddy. She kept her house and earned more pinetree shillings at her father's loom than either of them cared for spending.

He, Jonathan, was not a young man. He could not make the white chips fly any longer, nor take a woman to him with the pleasure that he once had. But the acres he owned were good ones and his goodwife worthy and easy to live with. He had a tight roof to his house and money enough to buy a brass clock if he took a fancy for one. Best of all, he could still linger over a noggin of ale in the sunset time after supper, while he talked with Ben Scarlett and Nat Ingersoll about the time when they had gone, empty-handed boys, to Orchard Farm.

The shifting moonlight crept across his face and an owl hooted in the wood. Jonathan stirred, shrugged the shoulder with the musket ball in it, and heaved the madder-dyed blanket over his whitening head. He slept. He dreamed of chips flying up, white and amber, into the spring blue.

As the moon moved coldly over to Jonathan's side of the bed, it left Remember's sleeping face a pale blur, outlined by the hair flowing darkly around it. Not sound asleep enough to be dreaming, memory ran through her mind more poignantly than she would allow it to run in the daytime.

If you had asked her for the first scene she remembered, she would have told you of something that happened before she was born, a familiar story, that seemed to her to be her own beginning. It happened on Boston Common where Jonet Thrale followed a flock of geese under the leafless trees on a sharp spring morning in 1662. Jonet, pale after being seasick all the way from Glasgow, had been in America one week and five days, and so had the plaid shawl wrapped around her shoulders, for she had brought little else with her, only a tight bundle befitting the servant wench she was. Young Daniel Wicom happened to be crossing the Common too, that morning, riding toward the north road that would take him back to Rowley, his pockets full of money for the cloth he had sold in town. He had never seen a girl with such blue eyes before--a square-shouldered girl, with firm, freckled hands. Before he got back to Rowley he had spent all the money in his pocket to buy Jonet's time from her mistress, but it was a month before he could get the banns cried properly in church and take his wife home.

Rowley belonged in its first days to a company of Yorkshire weavers who had received free lands from the Bay Colony because knowledge and practice of their craft were needed there. After a quarter of a century many of that town still followed the weaver's trade, and the thump and clack of the loom, the scattered thread and lint in corners, and the swift-growing patterns of warp and woof made a background for Remember's childhood that seemed like one long bright day with no one day in it that she could set apart from the others. She had no brothers or sisters. Jonet may have been injured at her birth, for afterward no child could cling in her womb for more than a month or two. Once the three of them spent a winter in Andover where Daniel and his wife set up their loom and wove for the townspeople and Remember went to work in the great kitchen of Governor Bradstreet, not because she needed wages, rather because the Bradstreets needed another pair of hands, and the tall eager child wanted to find out what life in their fine house was like. Mrs. Anne, the Governor's wife, who wrote books as well as a man could, had been dead scarcely a year, and books, her own and other people's, overflowed shelves and chimney cupboards, though her great library brought from England had burned some years before. Remember learned to read in that first winter at Bradstreet's, a thing Jonet could never do. She did not go back to Rowley with her parents in the spring, but she did not have her wish--to work for Mr. Simon until she had finished every book in the house. Two years from the time she left her father's roof she came back again, and set about learning to handle the loom, weaving her first coarse, uneven webs of cloth.

A stripling elm shadowed the low, peaked house, and before it spread a flat doorstone cut from the quarry at Marblehead. One night in March of the year she was seventeen, Remember opened the door in answer to a knock on it. On the doorstone stood two men--and one of them, Tom Purchas! There it was again, just as it had been for Dan Wicom and Jonet Thrale, love between a man and a woman that lasted them both to the graveyard. Tom, tall and fair and slow-spoken, looked at her out of very blue eyes. The thin, dark man with him, his brother-in-law Stephen Malbon, did all the talking. He had come to see Dan Wicom with an order for cloth, fifty bolts, and more if that proved good, for he was one of the richer merchants of Salem, rivaling Philip English, their leader. He talked in the kitchen with Daniel and his wife till the fire in the blackened chimney burned low and the moon climbed to the middle of the sky. Tom and Remember sat and looked at each other.

There were meetings after that, and before the apple trees blossomed at the end of April, Tom sailed for England on one of Stephen's ships, The Plover's Wing, and left Remember weaving her marriage linen to be used when he returned in the late summer. In June she went to Salem to visit his sister Rose, Stephen's wife. Rose, ailing and worn after a winter of illness, welcomed the gay strong girl into her house for companionship and to help with her child, Briony.

There was never a moment in Briony Malbon's life when she was not beautiful. Even at three years old, when Remember first knew her, she reminded her of a soft flame burning itself away. Pale gold hair, blue eyes--Tom's blue eyes, except that his were set in a strong face and hers in a petal-soft one--these, and a bright, gentle nature--everything about Briony warmed you and drew you to her. Remember loved the child, first because of Tom, later for herself, finally because there was nothing else that she could love for love and not because of duty. She had Briony in her arms, feeding her bread and milk in the candlelight of a sultry evening, when Stephen blundered in, black-browed and shaken, to tell them The Plover's Wing had gone down in mid-ocean with all on board. Rose wept and clung to her husband. Remember made no sound, watched Briony's eyes cloud with sleep. The next day she went back to Rowley and put her linen away.

Jonathan Winster came courting her that fall, and Dan and Jonet seemed to agree with him that it was time she went to her own house. It did not matter to Remember where she went or what she did. Tom Purchas was drowned in the salt sea. The marriage took place one evening in December, with the glare of the Great Comet falling on the snow outside, and the next day Jonathan drove her home to his well-stocked house on the spur of Hathorne's Hill, where two little girls watched with their noses flattened against the windowpane, and the idiot baby smiled vacantly from its cradle.

Remember was mistress of that house for three years before Briony came into it in the spring of 1683. Rose Malbon died that winter when her lungs filled so from the cold that she could breathe no longer. Dan Wicom died too, of the same thing, and a month before her, and his Jonet never spoke one sensible word after she looked on his dead face, but raved herself into a fever in time to go into the grave with him, sharing his bed forever, as they both must have wished it.

Death seemed at that time to be a tangible presence to Remember--a man in a black cloak stalking through the colony, and wherever he breathed, men died. One day in the late afternoon she looked out of the window and saw a man riding toward the house, black against the low, red sun. Was this Death, then, coming to Winster House for herself or for some other there? But no, it was Stephen Malbon with Briony wrapped in his greatcoat. Climbing from his horse he bore the child carefully into the house and set her down on the sanded floor. Briony ran to Remember and threw warm arms around her neck, rubbing her cold little nose against Remember's face, like a kitten. Remember looked down into Tom Purchas' eyes, blue as the sea he lay under.

Stephen was speaking. He asked her to take care of Briony for him. He said that he meant to close his great house, dreary now without Rose, and sail far to the east on a trading voyage as soon as the winter broke. He put a bag of money on the table.

From that day on, Briony had grown up in the house by Hathorne's Hill. Jonathan looked on her as another daughter, a delicate one, to be humored and cozened. Prudence and Tamar quarreled and played with her. Neddy stumbled lovingly after wherever she went. Remember loved the child with such a fierce, protective love that she had to turn away sometimes and bite her lips to keep the tears from coming. It was not right to love so. It was blasphemy. But Briony was beautiful flesh and loving spirit--and all that was left of Tom Purchas. So Remember loved on. Stephen Malbon cruised unhappily from one port to another. He came to see his daughter once or twice a year, bringing her a packet of rich presents, but he never took her away. He must not take her away! Remember shuddered in her sleep, and a tear slipped under her closed eyelids. Not that she wanted to keep Briony always a child, always by her, to shut her out from the sweets of life she herself could only guess at. No, Briony must have everything. She should have a fine husband, kin to the Hathornes, or the Corwins, or Philip English. Tall, and handsome, and loving he must be, with a fine mansion to take her to. She can ride out here in her coach to see me, dreamed Remember, for the roads will be run better by then, and she will ask me to stay the night when I've stopped too long in Town on market day. But come to harm she must not, nor go where I cannot see her--ever. Briony!

The moon went down, dropping slowly into the oak wood west of the cleared land, and the air in Remember's bedroom turned from black to blurred gray. Red light filtered through from the east, touching the frosty grasses around the house, the cornstalks left from harvest home. Jonathan, waking, reached out to touch his wife, but after a look at her sleeping face stayed his hand and turned over, and not because he was an old man. He could sense that she had deeply withdrawn into the fastness of her own soul and would brook no attempt at intrusion.