Animal Appetite (5 page)
Authors: Susan Conant
Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women dog owners, #Women Sleuths, #Winter; Holly (Fictitious character), #Dog trainers, #Dogs, #Maine, #Massachusetts, #Indian captivities, #Women journalists
But back to the obituary. Jack attended the Haverhill public schools and Harvard College. After graduation, he worked for a well-known Boston publishing house and then went on to found Damned Yankee Press. He was a member of the Friends of the Arnold Arboretum, the Friends of the Mount Auburn Cemetery, and the Friends of the Avon Hill School. I concluded that he’d been a friendly guy. Generous, too. He was survived by his wife, Claudia Andrews-Howe; a son, Gareth; and a daughter, Bronwyn. The funeral was to take place the next day, Friday, at Christ Church, Cambridge. The obituary gave no cause of death.
Fighting off vertigo, I searched through the reel for an article about the murder investigation or simply for Shaun McGrath’s obituary. Finding nothing, I succumbed to my headache, rewound the microfilm, and turned off the machine.
All public libraries in the Metro-Boston system let you access the computer listings of the whole system, but after standing at a terminal and entering every relevant term I could think of—Jack’s name, McGrath’s, murder and Massachusetts—the best I came up with were a few call numbers in the section of the library devoted to true crime. Poking around among the actual books, I found nothing about Jack’s murder.
My computer search for anything about Hannah Duston was equally unproductive, but in the short time I had left before I needed to get home to take care of the dogs, I browsed in the shelves devoted to colonial Massachusetts and found a few short write-ups, one in an old history of the commonwealth, the other in a book called
Travels in New England and New York
originally published in 1821 and written by Timothy Dwight, who’d been the president of Yale.
Travels in New England and New York
originally published in 1821 and written by Timothy Dwight, who’d been the president of Yale.
Let me summarize what I learned that day about Hannah Duston. According to Dwight, on March 5, 1697, Thomas Duston was working in a field. His wife, Hannah, was at home. She’d had a baby six days earlier. With Hannah was her nurse, Mary Neff. A midwife? Suddenly, a party of what the books stubbornly called “Indians”—what tribe?—attacked Haverhill and approached the Duston house. Thomas evidently got there too late to rescue Hannah, Mary, and the baby, or maybe he just didn’t feel up to the task. I couldn’t tell. Still, he managed to mount his horse and round up his seven other children. (On the Haverhill monument, hadn’t there been eight?) I couldn’t tell whether he’d gone to the field armed or had entered the house in time to get his gun. In either case, returning the fire of his attackers (or, according to some sources, holding his fire), Duston defended the children all the way to a distant house—a garrison, maybe—where this part of the Duston family found safety.
Meanwhile, another group of what I am forced to call Indians broke in, plundered and burned the house, and departed, taking Hannah, the baby, and Mary Neff as captives. Before the little band had gone far, the infant was snatched from the nurse’s arms and killed: dashed against a tree.
So much for
Dances with Wolves
.
Dances with Wolves
.
According to Dwight, late April 1697 found Hannah Duston and Mary Neff near what is now Concord, New Hampshire. (Hadn’t the Haverhill monument said March 30?) By then, the women were traveling with a group of twelve Indians and another captive, a young English boy, en route to a remote settlement where, Hannah was told, the prisoners would be stripped naked and forced to run the gauntlet. Instigated by Hannah, the English boy, who had been taken captive some time before, questioned his master about where to strike to kill someone instantly. In the middle of the night, as her captors slept, Hannah Duston used the knowledge the boy obtained. With the help of Mary Neff and the boy, she “dispatched,” as Dwight delicately phrased it, ten of the twelve Indians. The other two escaped. Hannah Duston returned to Haverhill with ten scalps.
Now that’s what I call tough.
CHAPTER 5
It’s almost impossible these days to fiind a really good vet who makes house calls like Steve Delaney. At ten-thirty that night, we got out a of bed to finish the take-out seafood lasagna he’d brought for dinner, and as we ate it, I started to ask, “Steve, if I’d had a baby six days ago and—”
“Are you breaking the news?” Steve has a really beautiful smile. His blue-green eyes change colors. He has a pointer, Lady, and a shepherd—German shepherd dog—India, but if he wanted a breed to match his looks, he’d own a Chesapeake Bay retriever. His brown hair waves like a Chessie’s, and he’s muscular, with no fat.
“Let me finish! It’s strictly hypothetical.”
“Damn.”
“I’m serious. Suppose I’d had a baby six days ago, and suddenly the house is surrounded by hostile Indians. Algonquins. Native Americans. Someone. I don’t know who they were yet. Anyway, you’re out in a field, and then you discover that there I am, baby to my breast, about to be murdered and scalped.”
“I grab my sickle, slay them all, and rescue the damsel in distress.”
“That,” I said, “is exactly what Thomas Duston didn’t do. He supposedly despaired of saving Hannah and the baby, and rescued their other kids instead. Seven, I think. Possibly eight. These experts can’t get their stories straight. Anyway, if I’d been Hannah, I’d have been none too thrilled to see him rushing off, leaving me to be taken captive.”
I waited while Steve ate some lasagna. He had a grandmother or maybe a great-grandmother who was apparently the world’s last believer in some nutty health craze called “Fletcherizing.” She made him chew everything thirty times before he swallowed. After a long while he said, “If they had seven or eight children, he must have figured out by then that Hannah could take care of herself without any help from him.”
I subsequently learned that Nathaniel Hawthorne had had an identical take on Thomas and Hannah Duston. Thomas Duston, Hawthorne wrote, probably “had such knowledge of the good lady’s character as afforded him a comfortable hope that she could hold her own, even in a contest with a whole tribe of Indians.”
“There is that,” I agreed. “Killing and scalping ten people doesn’t just come out of nowhere. And, of course, she had ample motive. She’d watched them murder her child, and she was terrified of what was going to happen when they got to the settlement, wherever it was Canada. But lots of people were taken captive, lots of women, and I’ve never heard of anyone else who did what she did.”
“You’re going to take Rita’s money after all?”
“I’m a freelance writer. Besides, this is going to be more work than I planned. By the time I’m done, I’ll have earned five hundred dollars.”
“Round-trip plane fare to Minneapolis is—”
“No! I’m donating it to Malamute Rescue. That’s the deal I worked out with Rita. Besides, for the millionth time, if you won’t go to Owls Head with me, I am not going to Minneapolis with you, especially since I have
already
celebrated, if you can call it that, an early Thanksgiving with my father. And I am not doing Thanksgiving here and then going to Minneapolis for a late Thanksgiving—”
already
celebrated, if you can call it that, an early Thanksgiving with my father. And I am not doing Thanksgiving here and then going to Minneapolis for a late Thanksgiving—”
“We could still try to get tickets for—”
“No! It’s too late to fly, it’s the busiest travel time of the year, and I’m not driving all that way, and you know that your mother would much rather see you without me around, anyway.”
I’ll spare you the rest.
The next morning, I was the first one up. After letting the dogs out in the yard for a minute, I leashed Rowdy at one end of the kitchen and Kimi at the other. Food is the one thing they’ll fight over, food and anything that resembles it. Rawhide. Dead squirrels. Rats, too, I suspected. I hoped that none of my neighbors was putting out poison. As soon as I opened the closet door to dish out the kibble, the dogs started yelping and screaming. As I added fresh Bil Jac from the bag in the refrigerator, both dogs were lunging and plunging and bawling. The bedroom door opened. Steve emerged and remarked at the top of his lungs, “Still starving them, huh?”
After breakfast, he checked what I was relieved to hear him pronounce a nicely healing wound on one of Rowdy’s front paws. See? Steve really does make normal house calls. Then, without kissing me good-bye, he left for his clinic, and when I’d tidied up, taken a shower, and walked the dogs, I called the police. I call the police all the time, not because I’m one of those nuts who are always hearing imaginary burglars, but because my next-door neighbor and friend, Kevin Dennehy, is a Cambridge police lieutenant. Sometimes I need to reach him at work.
Even at home, Kevin refuses to answer the phone with a cordial hello. Instead, he barks out his last name as if he were responding to a military roll call that grated on his nerves: “Dennehy!”
“Kevin, it’s Holly,” I said.
He softened. “Hey, how ya doing?”
“Fine. Listen, could I ask you a favor? I’m writing a story about a guy who was murdered in Cambridge eighteen years ago.”
“Girl reporter. You get sick of dogs?”
“Never. When the guy’s body was found, he was in his office, and his dog was tied to his desk. It was supposed to look like suicide, but the dog gave it away. When the guy was alone there, the dog was always loose. His business partner murdered him for some insurance money. The partner died in a car accident before your boys could arrest him. Officially,” I added, “I suppose it’s still unsolved.”
Kevin lapsed into a mock-Irish accent. “Eighteen years ago, I was but a slip of a lad meself.”
“Yes, Kevin, but miracle of miracles, records were presumably kept even before you joined the force.”
“Of sorts,” he conceded.
I gave Kevin names—John Winter Andrews, Shaun McGrath—and the date of Jack’s murder.
“Relative of yours?” he asked.
“Not that I know of,” I answered.
After that, I made a trip to the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library and returned home with a pile of photocopies and a stack of scholarly books that had nothing whatsoever to do with dogs. After dumping the Xeroxes and the tomes on the kitchen table, I made a pot of coffee and spent a few minutes savoring the sense that after all these years in Cambridge, I finally fit in. Until now, while other Cantabrigian writers were spinning dizzying theories about the causes of social revolutions, interpreting statistical factors related to contextually based aspects of psycholinguistic variation, and revealing latent feminist themes in the rediscovered works of nineteenth-century women novelists, I’d been scribbling about flea infestations and explaining, for the millionth time, how to get your dog to come when called. (Short answer: Use food.) Ah, but now? Fledgling Cambridge intellectual that I was, I preened with the pride of the newly hatched. Elizabeth Coleman:
New England Captives Carried to Canada
. June Namias:
White Captives
. John Putnam Demos:
The Unredeemed Captive
. And
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers!
Henry David Thoreau! Dog writer no more, I settled down to transform myself into an esteemed authority on Hannah Duston.
New England Captives Carried to Canada
. June Namias:
White Captives
. John Putnam Demos:
The Unredeemed Captive
. And
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers!
Henry David Thoreau! Dog writer no more, I settled down to transform myself into an esteemed authority on Hannah Duston.
Disillusionment set in as soon as I opened the Coleman volume to the section about Haverhill. Indian attacks, it seemed, were part of what she called Philip’s War. Wasn’t it King Philip’s? But I didn’t even know who Philip (king or no king) was, who’d fought his war, or what it had been about. Beginning the section about Hannah Duston, I was pleased to discover the name of the boy-captive who’d assisted her: Samuel Lenorson. He’d been snatched two years earlier from his father’s farm near what is now Worcester. Two years! No wonder he’d been able to converse with his captor! The next sentence bothered me. After Hannah and Mary Neff were taken prisoner, in Haverhill, the two women supposedly traveled for a hundred and fifty miles before reaching the island where Hannah carried out her famous deed. Hold it! From Haverhill, Massachusetts, to Concord, New Hampshire? Eighty miles? Unless by a very circuitous route? Furthermore, according to Coleman, the expert, although Hannah and Mary were told otherwise, running the gauntlet was a form of torture reserved for men; there was no evidence that women had ever been subjected to it.
Then came the killer, so to speak: Until now, I’d imagined Hannah’s captors as tall, strong men. As it turned out, of the twelve Indians, two escaped. One was a woman, who was badly wounded. The other was a boy Hannah and her companions had meant to spare. Of the ten remaining “savages,” only four were adults. Hannah Duston had killed and scalped six children.
And that’s not my idea of heroism.
The more I read, the worse it got. The band of twelve people was a family consisting of two men, three women, and seven children. The group had presumably been headed for a large settlement near Montreal. Roman Catholic converts, the Indians prayed three times a day. In between murdering infants and taking prisoners, I guess. I learned the name of the six-day-old baby: Martha Duston. Taking captives did at least turn out to be a practical, comprehensible activity: Indians held their captives for ransom. If Hannah had stuck it out, she’d probably have been exchanged either for guns or for French prisoners held by the English. The other thing Indians did with captives was adopt them into their families. The boy, Samuel Lenorson? Had the Indian family felt him to be one of their own?
The scalping, I gathered, was not part of Hannah Duston’s original plan. Rather, it was a grisly afterthought with a mercenary motive. It’s midnight. The Indians are asleep in the tent that everyone shares. The Haverhill monument and some old engravings showed everyone in the cold outdoors, with the wigwam in the background. In New Hampshire in March? I think not. So, inside the crowded wigwam, Hannah, Mary, and Samuel, armed with stolen hatchets, strike as one. The attack begins, I believe, with the men. Hannah certainly assigns herself one. Mary or the boy, Samuel, kills the other. (Samuel’s age? I did not yet know.) Simultaneously, someone crushes the head of one of the sleeping women. Another Indian woman is wounded, but escapes, as does the boy, who would have been spared. Who kills the third woman? The remaining children? According to the books, Hannah is the leader.
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