Brave Enemies (10 page)

Thomas Cranmer was born in 1489 and became a brilliant student at Cambridge. But when he married secretly and was found out he lost his fellowship. After his young wife died in childbirth he was reinstated by his college. I was thrilled to read that one of Cranmer's favorite ideas was that Rome should not have so much control over the English church. He wrote a paper arguing that nothing in the New Testament gave the pope such authority over all churches.

When Henry VIII decided he wanted to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, and the pope would not grant him a divorce, the king became very interested in the idea of an independent English church. Hearing about the young scholar at Cambridge, he brought Cranmer to court. Cranmer impressed the king so much that in a short time he was promoted from a mere deacon to be archbishop of Canterbury.

It moved me that Cranmer was a great poet as well as minister. He translated the services of the church and the calendar into English and added words of his own to make the Book of Common Prayer. But like Peter, that other founder of a church, Cranmer was also very human. Sent to Germany, he met the theologian Andreas Osiander in Nuremburg. And Osiander had a beautiful niece named Margaret whom Cranmer married secretly and brought back to England.

In the terrible times of Henry VIII and Edward and Mary Tudor, Cranmer worked and argued, confronted, and survived, until Bloody Mary demanded he return the English church to Rome. I had wept when I read in
Foxe's Book of Martyrs
how when he refused he was tortured. An old man by then, he was eventually forced to recant his faith.

But soon as he regained his health a little he denied his recantation. No threats or tortures could make him budge. Condemned to burn at the stake in Oxford, he held his right hand in the flames, “the hand that hath offended,” until it burned, and then he stepped into the center of the fire.

I admired Cranmer for his humanness, his fallibility, and the way he could rise above his weaknesses. If there was hope for me it was that I might rise above my failures and my weaknesses. For I too had the human stink and human frailty, even as I aspired to carry peace and hope to the broken world.

I
T WAS A PITIFUL SIGHT,
the three bodies hanging from an oak tree in the light of their burning house. You couldn't have dreamed anything more awful. The fire lit up the woods all around, like the door to hell had been opened and the world was burned by eternal torment. I smelled burning meat too but didn't know if it was stock in the burning barn or meat in the smokehouse. Smoke drifted across the clearing, making everything hard to see.

I'd never understood how men could hate each other and hurt each other so badly over politics.

“These are terrible times,” I said.

“We must cut the bodies down,” John Trethman said. I looked up at the oak limb and saw it was too tall to reach unless you were on a horse, and maybe not even then.

“We need a horse,” I said.

“I'm afraid I'm a circuit rider that travels on shank's mare,” the preacher said.

We looked around for a ladder or pole to climb on. Maybe there was
a table we could drag under the bodies to reach the ropes. Everything in the house was burning up, and I didn't see anything to stand on in the yard. Preacher Trethman looked at the tree and he looked at me. “You'll have to stand on my shoulders,” he said.

I'd not climbed trees since I was a girl. I was afraid if I climbed onto his shoulders he might feel my breasts or my thighs and see I was not a boy.

“Could we leave them till morning?” I said.

“These are the Fielders,” Preacher Trethman said. “It's not Christian to leave them hanging here like common criminals to be a spectacle. The crows will come and peck their faces.”

He knelt down beneath the tree and I stepped up on his shoulders. I was trembling and weak and my knees shook. I put my hands on the oak and John stood up. He was a tall man and I was just able to reach the big limb the ropes were tied to.

“Here,” John said, and pulled a knife from his pocket and handed it to me. I nearly fell when I reached for the knife. I put the blade between my teeth, for I needed both hands to climb out the limb.

I was shaky and tired. But you don't know what you can do till you have to do it. More than anything, I didn't want the preacher to know I was a girl. For if he knew that, he'd find out I'd killed Mr. Griffin and that Mr. Griffin had shamed me. For some reason the most important thing in the world at that moment seemed to be climbing that limb and cutting down the bodies so he wouldn't know I'd been shamed.

The hardest thing was to pull myself up far enough to wrap my legs around the limb. My arms were weak and I strained till I thought my eyes would pop out. I tried to hook my legs over the limb twice and slipped back, but finally made it. Hand over hand, I cooned out the limb, not looking down. When I got to the boy's body I held on to the limb with my left hand and cut through the rope with the right. I had to saw the knife back and forth. When I got most of the way through, the last fibers tore and the boy hit the ground like a sack of corn.

I crawled out farther and cut the second rope. But the limb bounced
and the rope swayed and it took me even longer to cut the woman down. But I finally made it and inched out to the last rope. My arms trembled so badly I could hardly hold on.

“I'm going to fall,” I yelled.

“You're almost through,” the preacher called back.

The rope swayed when I cut at it, as if the knife had gotten dull. I sawed at the rope and hacked at the twisted strands. I was so tired my arms felt frozen. The world was upside down and backward, and I tried to look only at the rope. The knife felt like it had no edge or that I was trying to cut with the wrong side. I stopped and just hung there. The glare from the burning house was hot on my face

“Just a little more,” the preacher shouted.

I pulled all the strength from my toes and from deep in my guts. Smoke drifted in my eyes and burned my nose. I strained so hard tears came to my eyes. I rubbed the knife back and forth on the strings of the rope and sweat and tears made everything blur. With a crackle the rope gave way and the man hit the ground with a thud.

But as I put the knife in my teeth and reached for the limb with my right hand, my left gave way. I guess I had a cramp in my hand and couldn't grip any longer. My fingers slid off the bark and I fell backward. But my legs were still locked around the big limb. There I was, hanging upside down with the knife in my teeth. I let the knife go so I could holler out, and then my legs lost their grip on the limb and I hit the ground with a smack.

But what I hit was softer than the ground. It was the body of the man that had just fallen. My head hit his head with a bump, and there I was, face to face with his eyes bulging out and blood on his mouth and the rope around his neck. My lips touched his cold bloody lips and I jerked away.

I rolled aside and Reverend Trethman helped me to my feet. I was nearly too dizzy to stand. I bent over with my hands on my knees to catch my breath.

“They must be given a Christian burial,” John said. “We will do it tomorrow.”

The only building on the place that wasn't burning was the spring-house, and in the springhouse we found some old tow sacks. We took all the sacks and covered the bodies on the ground. And we carried rocks and poles and laid them on the sacks to hold them down. By then the fires were burning lower, but there was still plenty of light to see by.

T
HE TRUTH IS
I
WAS
so tired I don't remember much of the walk to the cabin on Pine Knot Branch. It must not have been that far, but I stumbled in a daze, numb from all the effort and all the terrible things that had happened. I felt I was dreaming a long nightmare as I stumbled along behind John Trethman.

When we got to the cabin and stepped inside I saw it was just one room with a fireplace and a cot in one corner. There was a table opposite the bed all covered with books and papers. But it was a cabin with a loft. John held the lantern up and I saw the shelf built over one-half of the cabin. There were logs reaching out from the wall in a kind of ladder going up to the loft.

“You can sleep up there,” John said. He gave me a blanket, a thin gray blanket, and I pulled myself up the logs to the loft. On the puncheons up there lay a tick stuffed with leaves or corn shucks. There was no fire in the fireplace below and the cabin was cold. I took off Mr. Griffin's coat and wrapped it over me, and I pulled the blanket over that. The bed was thin and rumpled and had lumps in it, but that didn't make any difference. I heard John say good night below, or maybe I dreamed it.

When I woke in the morning it took a minute to figure out where I was. And then I remembered that I was supposed to be a boy named Joseph Summers, and a pain cut through the center of my bones.

I'd always wondered what it was like to be a boy. Since I was an only child, I'd just seen boys at church and at school. We didn't have any close neighbors, but I'd played with boys while Mama was at quilting bees and
spinning bees. Sometimes I wanted to be like a boy and climb trees and catch rabbits and possums. But boys were dirty. They caught toads and carried them in their pockets, and they didn't clean their fingernails. They wiped snot on their sleeves or the back of their hands. Boys could piss while standing up and they laughed when they farted.

I always wondered what it was like to have a thing hanging between your legs. I'd seen the thing on horses and on dogs. I wondered how it felt to have something sticking out there. I wondered how it felt to stick it in somebody. I shuddered and heard John Trethman stirring below. I looked over the edge of the loft and saw he'd started a fire in the fireplace. The cabin began to smell like smoke and burning cobs.

“Are you awake, Joseph?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” I said. But when I stirred I felt the soreness and stiffness in my arms and legs. My groin was sore and my back was sore. In three days my body had taken a lot of punishment.

“Fetch me some water for coffee and I'll make us some hoecakes,” the preacher said.

I threw the blanket aside and ran my fingers through my short hair and climbed down the logs to the puncheon floor. I put my shoes on and took the bucket he handed me.

“The spring's behind the cabin,” he said.

There was frost on the ground outside. The sun was a red spot through the trees. I relieved myself in the woods and then crunched over grass to the spring. When I returned with the bucket of water the cabin was warmer.

“Here, let me do that,” I said to John, and took the mixing bowl from his hands.

“Can you cook, Joseph?” he said.

“I can make hoecakes,” I said.

He had measured out the cornmeal and shaken salt from the salt gourd into the bowl. He handed me a gourd of soda and I sprinkled some of that in too.

“Where did you learn to cook, boy?” he said as he poured water into the pot for coffee.

“On hunting trips to the mountains,” I said.

When the coffee was ready and the hoecakes were ready, John cleared some of the papers from the little table and we ate there. The hoecakes were good and John got a jug of syrup to pour on the cakes. The steaming coffee warmed me.

“Now I must preach a funeral,” John said, “much as I dread to.”

I kept eating and didn't answer.

“I'm a song leader and a prayer leader,” John said. “I like services of praise and prayer. I like testimonials and hymns.”

“Could a funeral be a testimonial?” I said. I thought of the testimonies of the night before.

“It ought to be,” John said. “It ought to be a celebration. But we're too human for that. We mourn our loss. We look at the dead body, and we exhort, as Reverend Wesley tells us we must. We warn and we scold.”

I was surprised that Preacher Trethman was telling me how he felt. I'd never heard a preacher talk that way before. I poured syrup on another hoecake and ate it.

“The funeral of somebody murdered is sad,” he said. “There is no moral, except that life is short and evil afoot in the land. In these desperate times a preacher can be hanged for what he says in the pulpit. People are all torn apart and confused, and hatred and revenge rule the land.”

I couldn't think of a thing to say, for what he said was true. John Trethman was a handsome and eloquent man, but he was a worried man. Though he acted calm and spoke calmly, I could tell he was troubled. The death of the Fielders and the prospect of the funeral had shaken him more than I'd thought at first.

“It's easier to preach the funeral of those you don't know well,” John said. “But when they are victims of murder, what is there to say, but fear God and love thy neighbor. The world is harsh and getting sadder.”

He was so worried I wanted to reach out and touch his hand. I saw he
was a good man and a grieved man. He was different from Mr. Griffin, and he was different from Mr. Pritchard. I wished I could think of some way to comfort him. He had welcomed me to the little church and he had comforted me. I couldn't think of anything to say to make him feel better. I wanted to touch his hand, but I didn't.

“We have work to do,” he said.

I swept the crumbs off the table into my hand and tossed them into the fire. I rinsed out the cups and threw the water out the door. As the sun rose over the trees, the frost started melting on the grass.

That morning we walked from house to house in the country west of the river to tell what had happened to the Fielders. Some already knew, and maybe some helped kill them. John asked the carpenter named Satterfield to make coffins out of pine wood, and he asked somebody with a horse and wagon to bring the bodies to the church.

“There's something we'll have to do ourselves,” John said as we approached the little church on the hill. The log building looked different in daytime. It appeared to have shrunk in sunlight. The steeple was the size of a chicken coop with a pointed top and I saw there were graves on the knoll out beyond the church.