Читать книгу Peace, My Daughters - Shirley Barker - Страница 5

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"'When present times look back to ages past,

And men in being fancy those are dead,

It makes things gone perpetually to last

And calls back months and years long since fled.

It makes a man more aged in conceit

Than was Methuselah--'"

Briony's sweetly flowing voice stopped. She laid the book down on the oak settle beside her and picked up her crewel work.

"I'm sure she was a great lady, Remember, but I do not like to read her Works."

"I'm not sure that I like to hear you read them. But the mote is in our eyes. All the learned men of the colony say she was great. I have heard 'Zekiel Cheever's father, the old schoolmaster, say so."

"But I do not care for the things she writes about. Babylon's far, and Semiramis sounds like a bad woman."

"You can read in her about crickets and the seasons of apple trees. You love crickets in the hayfield, Briony. You always have."

Briony wrinkled her little nose, drew up her slim shoulders, lithe as a tree too young to blossom.

"Ah, Remember! Because you were a kitchen maid in her house once, and for no other reason, you think Mistress Anne Bradstreet is pure gold."

They sat together in the loom room on the east side of the chimney that climbed up the middle of Jonathan Winster's house. Remember was hackling flax, smoothing the long, whitish filaments and combing through them, first with a coarse comb, then with the finer ones. Her neighbors brought their wool to her and she wove it for hire into stout cloth, but it was turning the flax into linen that she really loved, and Jonathan, to please her, had seeded more and more of his fields with the blue-eyed flax plant. Briony could turn the flax wheel deftly when she was told, but otherwise she was more likely to spread out the bright yarns for her crewel work, or to hem herself a kerchief from the fine India cotton her father brought her. Remember had not tried to make the girl too diligent. The twins could spin as well, and three spinners were more than enough to keep one weaver busy; besides, the rank wool, smelling of animal fat, came to her already spun. Mary as well as Martha had a place in the Word, she thought, as she reached over to move the tea trivet nearer the fire. Stephen always left her a packet of bohea. She liked a cup of it well brewed in the late afternoon.

Jonathan clumped through the fire room that ran across the front of the house. He had just come from the woods, and his boots left a trail of leaf mould on the sanded floor. He carried his old blunderbuss in one hand and a mass of limp purple and gold feathers in the other.

"Got a wild turkey, Remember. They're none so plenty now."

Remember stood up, shaking little strands of tow from her gray skirt, and reached for the dead bird.

"I'll make a broth of it for Goodwife Craniver," she said.

"Ye missed Meeting to sit with her yesterday, and now ye would give her my turkey!"

"Not all of it." She smiled, knowing that his gruffness had no meaning. "Only a little of the broth."

"If I judge the lass rightly, she'd rather have the wing feathers to deck herself with than a gallon of the best broth in Essex County. But do as ye please and be done with it."

He turned to Briony. "And ye're making your pretties all alone. Where are my girls that should be helping ye?"

"The twins took Neddy and went a-leafing," smiled Briony, snipping a length of indigo wool for her needle.

Jonathan snorted. He knew the need for going a-leafing, gathering the oak leaves in autumn so there would be a supply of them to line the oven on baking days, but he knew, too, that this should have been done before the leaves were so sere and dry. He seemed to remember that there had been leafing expeditions earlier that fall.

"You can't expect them to spin all the time, Jonathan," said Remember reasonably. "They're children yet--younger than Briony. And they weren't born old and wise."

"No more were they born rich. They'd better be spinning against marriage."

"Someone else is not working, Uncle Jonathan," interrupted Briony. "Who left the field-work to go a-hunting and came home from hunting in time to have tea with the women folk?"

"You are home early, Jonathan," said his wife. "Does your shoulder ache?"

Jonathan dragged a buckskin jacket over his scarlet waistcoat and she stepped behind him to smooth it down in the back.

"If ye'd gone with the godly to Meeting yesterday, ye'd know that Mr. Parris wants the church members at his house this Monday, November second, an hour and a half before sunset. I'm off for it."

"You're late then. The sun's about set."

Jonathan drew his brows together. "He'll see us when we're able to be there. It's not his slaves in Barbados he's dealing with now, but Salem freemen."

"It's all well and good not to like Mr. Parris, for he's indeed hard and grasping for a man of God, but better not to say so outside your own house. There's been too much said already," counseled his wife.

He only muttered, drawing close the leather fastening of his jacket, shouldering the blunderbuss from habit, not because he needed it on his short walk through settled country.

"Take your cup while it's hot, Remember," called Briony who had been pouring the tea.

But Remember stood between her husband and the doorway. She thought suddenly of her encounter two nights ago with the man who had called himself John Horne. He had said he would be in Meeting yesterday--like a goodman of Salem Village. She had not been there to see if he had kept his word; she had been nursing Constance Craniver. Neither Briony nor the twins, when she questioned them, could tell her one way or the other. It would be a year or two yet before they would scan the men's side of the church with much interest.

"Jonathan," she asked coaxingly, trying to delay him, "were there any strangers in church yesterday?"

"I didn't take note of any. I was listening to sermon--what I went there for. Don't save any porridge for me. I'll know where the bread and milk is when I come home."

He tramped out. Remember turned back into the shadowy room and reached for the cup Briony held out to her. Instead of thinking about a strange young man, she had better think of the milking she would have to do tonight with Jonathan away.

Although the meeting had been called for an hour and a half before sunset, there was nothing left of the sun but rose and purple light behind Hathorne's Hill, and shadows marched in from the forest like an exiled people come back by night to take over their old country, as Jonathan passed the lighted windows of John Darling's gabled house and plunged into the weeds by Beaver Dam Brook. The water flowed sluggishly, he noticed, as he crossed the log-shored fording place, and a skim of ice had formed along the sandy edges. He felt it crunch under his boot soles. No leaves clung to the spreading willows or to the curious knobby ones that Daniel Rea, when he owned the land, had tried to cut like pollard trees in the old country. The scattering elms and maples were leafless too. Praise God for the oak! There was a tree for you! Fine as they grew in Framlingham, a great country for oaks, his father had told him. The oak leaves browned and dried, but they hung on till the new ones came in April. An old leaf should not fall till a new one grew. He sighed, thinking of his old age, of Remember's childlessness, and babbling Neddy.

But he was as firm as an oak tree yet! Men were not leaves! They were like the trees. Women were the foliage; soft and bright, but somehow feeding the tree. The others had gone like willow leaves, but Remember was like the oak leaf and she would not go. He passed John Hutchinson's. Through the lighted windows he could see the family gathered about their trestle table for the evening meal. He could see John's rugged profile bowed for the blessing. John must have decided to stay away from this foolish meeting that could only end in a parish quarrel. Jonathan half wished he had done the same. Captain Walcott's house had a light, too. A blooming wench, his daughter Mary. Either her father would find her a husband or she'd find herself trouble. Jonathan entered the orchard sloping gently down to a salt box house, the parsonage of Salem Village.

That house belonged to the parish, he stubbornly told himself, no matter what Mr. Parris said. It was not in their power to deed it away to any one minister even if they had wanted to--which they didn't. How Parson could claim that it belonged to him and his heirs forever, Jonathan could not understand. If he wasn't suited now with the salary he had agreed to come there for, let him take his troubles in prayer to God, the way he was always telling other people to do with theirs.

Jonathan lifted his head into the clear dusk with a yellow sky behind it and uttered a deep animal growl of disgust. Everybody in Salem Villiage seemed to be at the throat of somebody else. They would sit in the Meeting House on Sabbath and bow their heads to the text of "Love thy neighbor," and meanwhile, underneath, they hated each other like Hell, like Hell and fury. Nathaniel Putnam hated Francis Nourse with the hatred of a man born well-to-do for a man who has made himself that way. All the Putnams hated young Joseph Putnam because they said he had fared too well by his father's will. Hatred and land-greed, his own and others, had been behind it when Governor Endicott's son, Zerubabel, died mad in middle life, and some of the men who had maddened him and thieved his land lived prosperously in Salem now, thieving more. The Salem Village men hated the Topsfield men for clearing the green forest; hated them, and fought in the border woods with them, and wanted them prayed against. They wanted prayers, too, against Bridget Bishop over by Ryall Side, because she wore a red paragon bodice and ran a game of shovelboard in her tavern. Half the church hated the other half for voting out old minister Bayley. Reverend Parris hated Salem Village because he could not make money out of it and run the church as he had run his father's ships and warehouses--until he lost them. Everybody hated everybody else who gained a bit of land or put by a pinetree shilling, and asked why the good had gone to another instead of to themselves.

Beside the parsonage Jonathan drew himself up and took a clean breath of the fall night before he stepped inside. Did he hear or feel it--that heavy, ill-boding rumble like thunder, in the gray east over Salem Town? Trouble was coming. He knew it as surely as the farm animals knew before a storm fell. Praise God, if he were able to shield himself and his from the blast of it. He knew that the room within, the home of God's minister, would be thick and tense with hatred, and no place to praise God in. "Praise God," he said aloud, as he put his hand to the latch.

Abigail Williams, the minister's niece, showed him into a room where sixteen men of the parish sat together on carven chairs and rough benches. Abigail was a thin-faced girl of twelve with fading freckles, her eyes too large, too bright. She motioned Jonathan to a bench on the side of the room farthest from the fire. He felt cold there and he did not doff his buckskin, but he could see the face of everyone present in the uneven light of the bayberry candles. For the most part, they were good men here today. Some of the best, though, like some of the worst, had not come. Jonathan could read in their eyes that their minister would meet a thorny resistance if he sought to hound them for money, his salary not being in arrears.

Down in front sat the patriarch, Bray Wilkins, a rich man whom other men listened to; and Nathaniel Ingersoll, looking mild yet acrid, like the smoke of a wood fire or the tang of good cider not too old. You could make neither a knave nor a fool of Nat Ingersoll, thought Jonathan, getting up and going forward to take an empty seat behind and a little to the left of his old companion. Directly in front of him sat Peter Cloyse, so close that Jonathan could see the spreading stain which the bear's grease Peter slicked through his hair had left on his woolen collar. Peter came close to being a Topsfield man, and some folk said he sided with them--his enemies, most like. His wife Sarah was a sister to Francis Nourse's Rebecca, and Francis' son-in-law, John Tarbell, sat with Peter now. You couldn't trifle with John Tarbell. He'd quarreled with the Putnams and held his own at it. Jonathan wondered where Francis was. He liked Francis. Why shouldn't a tray-maker turn himself into a landowner if he had the wits to do it? Wasn't that why their fathers had come to America--that, and to praise the Lord?

Reverend Samuel Parris rose and stood facing the company, his back to the two logs of wood charring in a fireplace that would have held twenty like them. His wife's tiring glass had often told him that he had a face like a hatchet, but since it was his face, he was proud of it--a battle-axe of God. His youth in England, his few terms at Harvard, his years as a slave owner and merchant in the Barbados, were all behind him. Ordained now, a true minister, he was going to make this church of God a paying proposition, both for God and for Samuel Parris. He knew that he had inherited a long church feud, made more bitter by individual quarrels, but he was not like his predecessors, the genial Bayley; clever, courteous George Burroughs; or brilliant, unstable Deodat Lawson. He knew that certain leading clergymen of the Bay talked of a living force of evil at work, complained that their power over the people was waning. Such clergymen tilted with shadows! These farmers had hired him to pray for them and to run their town, and they must pay him for doing it. He would turn the force of prayer to his own just ends. He opened the meeting. He prayed. Then he went to the gist of the matter.

"Brethren, I shall speak, although so few of our membership have found themselves in such a state of grace as to be present. I have not much to trouble you with--" His tones moved up from the gracious to the plaintive. "But you know that at the last Town Meeting a committee was here chosen--chosen to see that your community provided me with firewood for the parsonage as it was promised."

He looked at the two slim sticks charring on the wide hearth. He turned to the parish clerk, Thomas Putnam. Thomas opened the parish book ostentatiously. He called the names of the committee, pausing after each one, answered only by silence.

"Joseph Porter! Joseph Hutchinson! Joseph Putnam! Daniel Andrew! Francis Nourse!"

None of the committee was present. The minister continued.

"What they have done or intend to do, you know, it may be, better than I. But you see--I have hardly any wood to burn--" His hand shot out flatly, like the head of a serpent leaping for the fireplace. "I need say no more"--he drew back and bowed--"but leave the matter to your serious and godly consideration."

In the following silence the ugly babble of black Tituba, the Parris servant, welled out of the kitchen at the rear of the house. Some men looked at their neighbors' faces; some at the toes of their square boots greased for winter. Some faces were timid, others hostile. All preferred to hold their peace. Finally a chair scraped back and Joshua Rea arose.

"As I mind it, Mr. Parris," he remarked mildly, "we, the church members of Salem Village, added six pounds to your salary on the condition that you furnish your own wood. We find that six pounds to have been paid for this year, 1691."

The minister looked straight before him. "You mistake the terms of the contract, Goodman Rea. Will you read the record from the parish book, Mr. Putnam."

Again Thomas Putnam rose, shaking back his dark hair worn a little longer than most of the Salem men wore theirs.

"The terms of the contract are here," he droned, and he read--a long list of perquisites guaranteed by Salem Village Church to Mr. Samuel Parris if he should come to settle there.

Whispers broke out in the group, as when a seething pot bursts over its rim.

"I was one of the men who called him," muttered John Tarbell. "Can't say I promised him any o' that."

The Reverend Parris heard him. He turned flecked eyes, the eyes of an adder, on the young farmer. He said nothing.

"I don't know," murmured Nat Ingersoll. "We needed a minister then--bad. Mr. Lawson had gone back to Scituate, and we was without preaching. But we couldn't have promised him so much--"

"Could be those fine terms was never in parish book till after Parson got his hands on it," whispered Peter Cloyse. "Wouldn't sell my birthright for no mess of pottage like him."

"We never promised to give him this house 'in fee simple,' or any other way," said Jonathan, hauling himself to his feet. "The parsonage and its fields and orchards belong to whatsoever man is preaching the gospel to us, only while he is preaching it."

A pleasant murmur of agreement went around the room. Farmer Dodge and John Raymond, who had fought beside Jonathan at Narragansett, applauded their old comrade-in-arms with a subdued cheer. The minister's face darkened. Bray Wilkins stood up.

"I'm cold here. I'm going home--where there's a fire. Mr. Parris, a man of God better spend his salary for wood if he wants wood, and not go hounding the freemen."

Coats were pulled closer, benches pushed back. Everybody seemed to take pleasure in agreeing with Bray's wisdom. Hate lay black in the minister's eyes.

Thomas Putnam, the parish clerk, interrupted. "May we vote?" he asked shrilly. "May we vote that my uncle, Captain John Putnam, whom we all know--"

"Aye, that we do," hissed John Tarbell, "the old devil!"

"--that my uncle and the two deacons go as messengers to the aforesaid committee and ask them to lay a special tax rate for the minister for his necessary supplies, and that we all meet here again, say on November tenth, to discuss it and to see that they have discharged their duty?"

"Aye," boomed Bray Wilkins, "leave it to Francis Nourse and Dan Andrew. They'll see just debts are paid and no other. Vote yes, men. I want to get home. But I'll not be back on November tenth"--he looked directly at Samuel Parris--"unless it be decently warm here."

Parris looked back at him, covering his hatred with a sleek self-righteousness. "It will not be warm here unless your committee furnishes the wood to make it so," he said.

Bray Wilkins lumbered out, followed by William Way. Feeble "ayes" sounded for the vote. The men trooped after them, too dispirited to talk with one another or to stop at Ingersoll's tavern just across the green. A fair fight was one thing, and they could stand being beaten in it, but this meeting had been a low wrangle in the house of God. Their honest spirits felt unclean. And they were confused. Had they been niggardly with God in trying to protect their substance from His unworthy representative? After all, they had paid Sam Parris six pounds for wood, and if he had no wood to show for it, it was his own fault. Mr. Parris stood by the dead fire, offering no farewells. Jonathan's fingers, stiff with the cold, had trouble fastening the leather hasp at his collar. While he struggled with it he heard what Nathaniel Ingersoll said as he drew close to the parson.

"Could we put up his name in Meeting next Lord's Day, Mr. Parris? He seems like a godly man, and he cobbled Hannah's boots most skillfully, for sure he did."

"We will see, Ingersoll, after the matter of my rights has been attended to," said Parris disinterestedly, turning toward the door of his study.

The deacon moved away, letting a hand fall on Jonathan's shoulder.

"Come home with me, Jon Winster, and have a noggin of cider--or Madeira, if you prefer it. Your pretty Remember will keep your supper hot. There's a stranger put up at my tavern I'd like your opinion on. A traveling shoemaker he is, John Horne by name, like our old elder but no kin, and he wants to set up in Salem Village. I've put his name in to Mr. Parris, for he'd like to join with our church, and no man who wants the Word of God should go without it. He'll cobble your boots free to show you how well he can do it."

Jonathan might have accepted the invitation for a drink at the tavern if it had not been for this John Horne whom he felt too disturbed to meet.

"Ah no, Nat. I do not need my shoes cobbled. I'll come in and souse with you in a day or two, for you'll still dip your nose if you are a deacon, I warrant. But there's trouble coming, and I can't drink it off, I don't feel."

"Trouble, Jonathan? Is aught wrong at your house? The girls, or Mrs. Remember?"

"No, no. Not us. All this fighting in the parish. Parson hates us all."

The two men were walking through the starlight now.

"And too many of us hate each other. We covet, Nat. Houses, and land, and maidservants and menservants, that are within the gates. We even covet the gates. And if we do not covet our neighbor's wife, 'tis because she's not fair--"

"You'd best leave preaching for Parson, Jonathan. He does it better and we pay him for it, whatever he says about that. Come have a drink. There'll be no trouble. We're a little sharp, but we're all good men here. We wouldn't hurt each other. Come meet John Horne."

"I don't want to meet John Horne," said Jonathan, turning north through the parsonage orchard. "I am cold and my shoulder aches. And if the Devil's not loose in Salem Village he soon will be."