My Name is Resolute (16 page)

I ran and fetched water and was just returning with it when I saw Mistress emerge from the house and walk toward the washing. “Mary,” she called. “I want you to bring more wood. What’s this?” She held the corner of my quilted petticoat.

“’Twas made by my ma, Mistress. Before I was taken from my home.”

“These stitches are new. That looks like my thread.”

It was, of course, but I lied and smiled. “My gown lies there, Mistress. I pulled threads from it to sew the petticoat. The blue there,” I said as I pointed to it.

“This thread is mine.”

“I swear it is not, Mistress.” I bowed my head and curtsied again, and I made sure not to rise fully, keeping my feet well hidden beneath the brown skirt. “I
never
steal,” I said, shaking my head.

A female voice from inside the house shrieked as if someone had been injured. “Look at this! Look at this!” I heard. Had she found my dirty stockings? My hands went weak and I let go of the buckets. One tipped over on my shoe, flooding it with water.

“Pah!” Birgitta shouted. “Look at that, now!” And she raised her hand to strike me but lowered it without doing so.

Rachael came from the house with something in her hands clutched against her meager breasts, her face brighter than ever I had seen her, squealing with delight. She saw her mother and ran this way. “Mother, Mother! I couldn’t find my rug, the Persian rug you said was my dower, until I discovered that Mary had been sleeping on it, and this was hidden under it. And look what’s in it!” She held in her hands my mother’s gold-cornered wooden casket with the pieces of eight worth two pounds inside. Rachael took the six shillings in her hand and danced around, chanting, “It’s a dowry, a dowry!”

Mistress asked, “Where did you get this?” as she held out her hand.

Rachael placed the coins and the box into it. “Under my rug, Mother. Hidden by a thieving little servant girl.”

I pretended bravery. “That box is mine,” I said. “I will thank you to return it,” and I held out my hand as if expecting they would.

Mistress held the coins, dropped them into the box, and closed it, shaking it, listening to the satisfying rattle of money. She wheeled around and loomed over me, saying, “Where did it come from?” Mistress shook the casket at me. “Speak up, Mary. You never have a want of words. Let’s hear where you got this.”

“My mother gave it me,” I said, never taking my eyes off it. “When we were captured by Saracens. I have kept it in my pocket. It will help buy my price, when I can earn some other coin to go with it. I shall have it now, if you please.”

Mistress said, “In your pocket? All this time? I don’t believe you. Why did you not present it to us to keep for you if it was honest gain? No, you hid it like a thief.”

“The box is worth some, too,” Birgitta said. “This has gold.”

I waved away the thought. “Gold? I think not. Pure brass. Who would give gold to a child? It was just an old casket Ma threw some coins in as I was taken from her. If there were gold in it, the Saracens would have had it. The English privateers did not want it when I offered it in trade for food. Why, they laughed in my face and threw it back at me. They had
trunks
full of gold doubloons. Why would they want an old box with brass corners? They would have
kept
it, if it were gold.” I held my hand closer to the box, ready to snatch it from her fingers.

Mistress raised it up before I reached it. “You are a liar and a thief. You stole this. Perhaps from your last mistress. And you intend keeping it from me, who has provided you food and a home all these days? I’ll take you to the magistrate to be hung if you so much as say another word about it.” Mistress Hasken gripped Ma’s casket in her fat, greasy fist and stormed into the house.

A stinging thud hit my shoulders as Birgitta brought her stick down upon my back. “You spider. You misbegotten pisspot! I ought to hang you myself.”

“I did not steal it. It was my ma’s.”

“Liar! Liar! Liar!” she shouted with each swing of her arm. “I’ll beat you so you never forget it.”

I shrank to the ground under her blows. I counted them until I lost count. Later, when Birgitta had gone into the house, later, when I was alone, later, later, did I weep for Ma’s casket and the two pounds of my price lost.

The next day, sore of body and soul as I was, Birgitta took me by the arm and stood me, sending me to work. I fixed my face like stone, barely moving my lips to speak. I muttered Birgitta’s name without “mother” attached and said “yes, Mistress” when spoken to. I worked carelessly, spilling things, dragging clothing across the dirt floor, forgetting what I’d been sent for so that every errand took two trips.

Mistress insisted on inspecting my petticoat again, and I clutched the back of my chair as she raised my skirt and squeezed at it, terrified that her hands would find the treasures hidden and I would have no hope, completely adrift. But her hands were no more clever than her eyes, and she did not test the thickness. “This padding? What is it?”

“Woolen, madam.”

“Woven? Carded? Think, Mary. Pah. You’re as dull as a stump.”

I shook my head, trying to remember anything at all of my mother’s evenings spent on this petticoat. “It is two layers with a mat of woolen lint between them. The two are made into one by the rows of sewing.”

“Not carded well, I think. Your mother wasn’t good at it, was she? If indeed she did make this. You and Birgitta will make a petticoat like this for Rachael.”

Mistress produced a hopsack full of goat hair that she wanted used to pad Rachael’s petticoat, and we began matting it out, spreading the hair and pressing it in as evenly as possible. In the bottom of the sack, I found remnants of goat dung, dark and crumbling, fallen from the hairs at some earlier time. When Birgitta’s attention waned, all of the dung found its way between the layers of linen, under the hair, so that it would add a certain air of elegance to Mistress-Rachael-the-Reverend’s-wife.

Birgitta insisted I sleep with her to keep her warm. Fighting angry tears, I lay there as I was told. Soon as she snored, I crept from her bed and went to my own place up the stairs by the chimney under the bearskin. She said nothing of my absence in the morning. This I would use, I promised myself, my fists in tight balls, the knowledge that she was both forgetful and somehow longed for my affection.

CHAPTER 8

March 17, 1730

I expected Rachael to wed in a church at least or have a ballroom prepared for dancing. Instead, they went inside a house, to a man who put on his head a ratted old wig, and when he asked them if they intended to marry, Rachael and Reverend Johansen said, “Yes.” They signed their names to a paper. It was the dullest wedding I could imagine. Not a note of music or a single sweet. I wondered how the parson came to be burdened with the Haskens’ oldest daughter, but I saw no other single girl whose level of hopeless ugliness might make her willing to marry an old, poor parson. I felt sorrow for him, waking up next to a hag every morning.

Later, Reverend and the new Mistress Reverend sat before the fire talking of plans for their new home, the building of a meetinghouse, a garden, and when we would leave on the venture. I heard him say that he “would abstain from taking her to wife until it can be under our own roof.” Both Master and Mistress nodded as if this made sense to them.

When word came that all was ready for the move, it took two days to get everything loaded into the wagon. As we walked away, the house looked as if robbers had ransacked it. Cupboards stood ajar, a rag lay there and a broken crock here. Fluttering like leaves before a hurricane, we set out on the muddy, rutted road that led away from the town. Family after family joined us on the road, with carts pulled by horse, ox, dog, or cow. One man hitched himself to a wagon and pulled it with his own legs. His wife and two children walked.

We walked for what seemed like hours with no sound but the complaints of the animals and the creak of the wheels. Birds overhead made strange calls. A rabbit darted from the brush and someone’s dog chased it. Dark woods, so thick it made a roof over our heads, closed in upon us. In Jamaica, I was never without several strong slaves breaking out the forest for us to pass, my family never walking, always riding in a coach.

This was a land of cold, just as Ma used to tell in stories of Scotland and England. Was this also a place of brownies and trolls and the most terrible of all, fairies? Did duppies watch us? The forest seemed alive with strange sounds in dark misty dells just out of sight. I tried to remember the charm Patey and I had sung. I could not remember it.
“Gumboo, gumboo,”
I whispered, tapping one or the other of the goats with each word. I craned my neck at every turn to see Patey somewhere ahead.

Suddenly as a summer rain, a flutter of gasps and soft cries rose from our company. I looked toward the trees and the glade through which we had just passed seemed alive with movement. I thought it was rain, or wind, or a dozen wolves come for us. The bushes parted and the forms of men appeared, men with long black hair such as I had never seen, with faces painted red as a barn door. Some of them wore no shirts but breeches and vestments and leggings with wrappings on their feet. Bowmen all, they raised arrows toward us and we struggled keeping the animals straightened and still. The men were marvelous to look upon. The goats wandered as I stopped.

Reverend Johansen raised his hands and said, “Ho, brethren! Hello?” None of the men answered. He spoke again, first to us on the road, “Just some of God’s children we call Indians. I will trust that we will pass safely. Pray, brethren.”

“Indians,” whispered Birgitta.

To the Indians, he spoke in his sermonizing voice. “We are pilgrims. We go to a new settlement west of here. I have already spoken with your chief men. We are no enemies of the Red Man. He assured us we may pass.” The strangers spoke to one another in whispers. Reverend Johansen said a couple of the words he knew in Indian tongue. One of the Indians shouted at us. Running up and down the line of us, he waved his arm and menaced us with words.

“Let us move forward, friends,” Reverend Johansen said. “Move on, making no alarm. Show them we are just travelers.” The party started to move. The Indians stepped back, and with no more than the flutter of a leaf, they disappeared into the woods. The rest of that day we kept quiet and watchful.

“Birgitta? What is the name of the place where we go?”

“New Town.”

A town? My heart lifted. “Where does it lie?”

“By Collins Pond.”

“Shall I be able to send a letter from there?”

“Are you some queen of England to be sending letters about?”

I saw Patience walking far in front, but I could not leave the goats to go run ahead and find her. The strange sounds of the forest made me think I knew things that could not be known by mortals. We walked until the sun cast long shadows from the trees, dipping below them, and all was shadow and more shadow. We slept on the road itself that night. I sank where Mistress pointed, amidst the goats. Goats are naught but bones and bleating, and their hair was not warm nor their bodies soft. Of course, there was the smell, too, bitter as overripe vinegar, intrusive as bile.

The third morning, we came to a cleared place where several small houses, roughly fashioned of logs, clustered at the end of the road. I had never seen such houses, their only windows being places where the logs had been cut, and covered with shutters. I would be gone when the winter snow blew into those holes. The Haskens’ goats went into a fenced yard. The settlement house was luxurious compared to what they had before, though it held no upper floor. Everyone was to sleep together on the floor.

No sooner had we gotten a few things put inside than I heard one of the girls scream as if she had been torn limb from limb. The air filled with the odor of a bear. I knew it from the skin under my bed, only this was earthier, potent, sharp as a foaming horse. I rushed out the door in curiosity to see Christine and Lonnie standing at the edge of the forest. Christine sank to the ground as if the heart had gone out of her and her knees could not hold her. Master ran toward them, carrying a pickaxe. Lonnie came running past me and flew into Mistress’s arms while he ran to Christine, threw down his axe, and scooped her up in his arms. He carried her to the house and laid her before the fireplace. Mistress made a pallet on the floor and they laid Christine on it. She breathed with her mouth wide open. Mistress crooned and said, “Poor little thing. Poor thing. Birgitta? Is there water in the house?”

I got a bucket, saying, “Here it is, Mistress.” I almost added “you old spider,” but stopped myself.

Mistress dipped a rag in the bucket and wiped Christine’s face over and over again. She sang to her and murmured things I could not hear. I stepped back. This was the first time I had seen her care for anyone. Still, I thought, with all those stories about wolves tearing people limb from limb, why would the girl not fear so to see a bear? People in the settlement came and many had opinions about whether the girls had in fact seen an animal or were simply overwrought from the traveling. Neither of them could give witness to what had happened, so it was decided that they’d only had a moment of hysteria. No one asked me if I smelled any bears about, so I said nothing. It would serve them all right, I thought, were the whole family to be eaten alive by a single bear and there in its great stomach they could bewail their circumstances as I had in the hold of a slave ship.

That evening Birgitta and I helped Mistress prepare supper. Lonnie went back to braiding her hair though Christine continued entranced. She wet herself. Everyone had to sleep upon the floor, but they made me sleep next to her and I squirmed there in the dark, trying in the crush of bodies to make room between us in case she wet again.

The banging and pounding of building another house began almost before the sun was up. After the day of seeing the bear, while Christine stayed quiet, Lonnie became talkative and rambled about, getting into things, poking sticks in a hornet’s nest, putting her bonnet on a dog, dumping out the neighbors’ milk jug. She was made my charge to lead and watch over just like the goats.