Grave Designs (13 page)

I knocked on my landlord's door. No one home. It was seven o'clock. Linda probably had taken the kids and Ozzie out for a walk. I left a note on her door and walked upstairs to my apartment.

It was stuffy inside, so I opened a few windows. I put a head of romaine lettuce under the kitchen faucet and went to my bedroom to change. I owed my parents a letter. I'd write them tonight.

I was cutting up a salad when Linda knocked on the door. She had Ozzie with her.

Linda came into the kitchen. “You'll never guess who dropped by an hour ago,” she said.

“Who?”

“Mr. Wonderful himself. Professor Mason.” She rolled her eyes heavenward. “He was as polite as a boy scout.”

“I saw him downtown at the office today.”

“Oh?”

“He wants us to give it another try.”

“And?”

“I don't know,” I said, cutting a tomato into the salad. “He came awful close to begging. And that about killed it for me.” I cranked open a can of tuna, pressed the lid to squeeze the water into the sink, and scooped half the tuna on top of the salad.

“Well, he might not be that bad, you know,” Linda said. “Look at it from his end. If he really has grown up, then he must feel terrible about what he did.”

“I'll see.”

“It'll be good for you, Rachel. Just be careful.”

“Don't worry.”

“Well, Paul dropped this off for you,” she said as she handed me a large manila envelope. “He said you'd know what it was all about.”

Chapter Fourteen

After I finished dinner and the dishes, I opened the manila envelope and pulled out a slender sheaf of photocopied papers stapled at the upper-left corner. There was a note from Paul Mason paperclipped to the first page:

Dear Rachel:

Here's that Canaan booklet I told you about. It's a Xerox from the rare books collection of the Barrett College library. I'll be having breakfast at the Main Street Cafe tomorrow at 8 if you want to talk about it. I'll be out most of the rest of the day—faculty meetings.

It was great seeing you today!

Your friend,
Paul

Faculty meetings? Were they in the same category as his student “conferences”?

I slipped off the note and flipped through the booklet. Thirty-one pages, copied two pages per photocopy.
The Lottery of Canaan,
by Ambrose Springer. Copyrighted 1903 by the Springer Trust. Springer had dedicated his little book to his sister, “As a slight token of the generous sympathy which has cheered me at each stage of this arduous undertaking.”

I walked into my bedroom, pulled down the bedspread, and propped up the pillows. Clicking on the reading lamp on my nightstand, I got comfortable on the bed.

In his two-page introduction Springer complained of the difficulties which “bedevil the foolhardy soul who embarks on a mission to rescue from the crypt of time a long-forgotten tale of Colonial America.” His mission had taken him “into musty attics in search of old diaries, into the dank storage rooms of old churches in search of the recordations of daily life long ago, and into old burying grounds for a glimpse at faded epitaphs engraved on crumbling tombstones o'ergrown with weeds.”

I turned to the first page and began reading:

Perhaps no tale from the earliest days of our young republic is more curious than the brief history of Canaan, Massachusetts. Those in possession of maps of the Commonwealth will search in vain among the cartographer's markings for a sign of that little village. Canaan existed for but a mere quarter of the 17th century, and all references to it were expunged from the Commonwealth's record in 1699 by unanimous vote of the Congregational ministers. All that survives are a handful of sermons and diary entries by Canaan's young minister; a tattered remnant of a hand-printed advertisement; and the faded and besmudged records of that small village's church. This pitiful and tantalizingly incomplete record was rescued from oblivion by your humble author after a fire nearly destroyed the South Hadley home of Jonathan Frye, who claims to trace his ancestry back to Mr. Joseph Frye of Canaan.

Our tale commences in 1675, one year after young Winthrop Marvell graduated from Harvard College with a degree in ministry. Of his youth we know little. He was born in Boston in 1655, the sixth son of Richard and Anne Marvell, who had made the perilous pilgrimage to the New World in 1649.

Young Reverend Marvell settled in Cambridge Village after his graduation from Harvard College. In 1679, some of the inhabitants of that fair village, complaining of the lack of adequate land, announced their desire to leave the banks of the River Charles to set forth to investigate new territory in the wilds of western Massachusetts. Young Marvell consented to accompany them and serve as their minister.

On the morning of May 10, 1679, 119 hardy men and women assembled on the Cambridge common with all their possessions, including seventy head of cattle. After solemn prayer led by their fervent young minister, they set forth to the beating of the drum which hitherto had summoned them to church. Following ancient Indian trails through the deep forests, they made their way slowly west, driving their cattle before them.

Seven days later, these pioneers reached the banks of the broad Connecticut River. Claiming a gentle hill overlooking the river, they commenced the construction of their small village, which they named Canaan, harking back to the Promised Land of the Hebrews.

Tragedy first struck Canaan in September of 1685. It came in the form of a storm so fierce and relentless as to rival the great Boston storm of 1635. Young Marvell described its terrible onslaught in his diary:

Such a mighty storme of wind & raine as nonne living in these Parts, either English or Indean, ever saw. Being like those Hauricanes that writers make mention of in ye Indeas. It began in ye Morning and came with such Violence in ye beginning, to ye Amasamente of many. It blew downe sundry houses & uncovered others & blew downe many thousands of trees, turning up ye stronger by ye roots and breaking ye higher pines in the middle. Several are ye dead and ye injured. Edmund Barnard lost his gentle wife….

The storm destroyed nearly half the village's buildings, and included in its path of devastation the small church and Reverend Marvell's simple house.

The following evening, the Elders of Canaan met with Reverend Marvell to plan the reconstruction of the church. According to the surviving church records, those in attendance that fateful eve were Richard Bradstreet, Joseph Frye, Simon Blake, and Benjamin Marshall. By flickering candlelight the Elders of Canaan debated the merits of various means for raising funds to rebuild the church. After many hours the Elders voted to fund the reconstruction by holding a lottery.

Dear reader, please recall that in the early days of our fair republic, lotteries were widespread. Indeed, history records at least one such lottery held years before the lottery of Canaan: the Jamestown lottery. In 1607, the village of Jamestown was founded by the Virginia Company. By 1612, due to disease and famine, the future of that young settlement was in grave peril. The principals of the Virginia Company seized upon the idea of a lottery to finance the expedition, and thereby prolonged the life of that woebegone settlement.

In Colonial America, lotteries raised money for many public improvements. The great colleges of Columbia, Harvard, Dartmouth, and Williams, to name but a few, were built or supported by the proceeds from lotteries. Lest we forget, in 1776 the Continental Congress established a lottery to raise much-needed funds for our Revolution. Alas, the Revolutionary War lottery proved a financial disappointment.

I knew about financial disappointments. I looked up at the Matisse poster on my wall. None of my lottery tickets had ever gotten me to France. I went back to my reading:

That first lottery of Canaan in 1685 proved a success, and the little church was rebuilt before winter. But the curse of Canaan remained, and that February a most ferocious blizzard destroyed the church and killed several villagers. The Canaanites rebuilt again their little church, raising the funds through yet another lottery.

Tragedy struck once more that summer, wounding the young minister most cruelly of all. The prior winter Marvell had married young Rachel Lowell, a fair damsel of sixteen, who had traveled west with her parents. By July 1st, according to the young minister's diary, his pretty wife was already heavy with child. Alas, two weeks later she was dead, the victim of a four-day storm that caused the Connecticut River to overflow its banks. The raging cataract of water swept the young bride down the river to her death. The lamentations of her grieving husband still pluck at the strings of our hearts more than two centuries after he recorded them in his diary:

My dear and loving wife departed this life after we had been married and lived together 7 months and 14 days, whereby I am bereaved of a sweete and pleasante companion & left in a very lonely and solitarie Condition.

Reverend Marvell confided less frequently in his diary during the next few years. His sporadic entries, however, record a most unusual series of tragedies that befell that hapless community. The village knew famine, disease, repeated Indian attacks, fires, and storms. As Reverend Marvell wrote:

I believe never there was a poore village more pursued by ye wrathe of ye Devil than our poore village. First, ye Indean Powawes moleste our planters. After this, wee have had a continued blaste upon somme of our principal Grain. Herewithal, wasting sicknesses, especiallie Burning and Mortal Agues, have Shot ye Arrows of Death in at our Windows.

But Canaan also knew occasions of supreme felicity: bountiful harvests, miraculous recoveries from fatal diseases, unexpected generosity from neighboring savages.

At first the lotteries of Canaan were simple affairs involving a fortnightly drawing for a prize of grain or butter. But some of the villagers grew discontent with the manner in which their wealthier brethren purchased myriad tickets for each drawing, thereby multiplying their chance of victory. It was Reverend Marvell who introduced the first and, in retrospection, the most profound innovation into the lottery system: two tickets would be drawn, one for a prize and one for a penalty. This elegant solution to the hoarding of tickets injected a new element of risk into the melancholy lives of the Canaanites.

In the beginning, the penalty was a mere fine. As Reverend Marvell notes in his diary entry for May 5, 1690: ‘Goodman Phillips drew ye penaltie Ticket and, according to ye day's charte, was ordered to donate 9 stalkes of corne to oure church.' But on July 7, 1690, Richard Pierce drew the penalty ticket, refused to pay the fine, and was forced to sit in the stocks for a day. By March of 1691, the payment of a fine had been eliminated and instead the owner of the unlucky draw was simply ordered to spend a day in the stocks.

The next major change came the following spring. The poorer villagers had complained of the purchase price of the lottery tickets, and some of the wealthier Canaanites had elected to withdraw from the lottery for fear of drawing the unlucky number. The resulting diminution of funds threatened the very existence of the lottery, which by then had become an important element of the village's fragile economy. The Elders of Canaan met with Reverend Marvell and voted to dispense with the requirement of purchasing a ticket. Thenceforth, every adult member of Canaan was enrolled in the lottery and the purchase of tickets was abolished. An annual tax levied on the head of each household supported the lottery.

Reverend Marvell's sermons (and diary) were wont to be written in a fine hand on small pages four by six inches in size. Those sermons that have survived reveal a disquieting preoccupation with biblical lotteries. The one I hold before me quotes the Old Testament (Num. 26:55—56), where the Lord instructed Moses to take a census of the people of Israel and divide the land among them by lot. In this same sermon Reverend Marvell describes how the first king of Israel was selected by lot. In yet another sermon, Reverend Marvell reminds his followers that after the death of Judas Iscariot, a casting of lots determined that Matthias and not Joseph should be named his successor as apostle.

Alas, Reverend Marvell's obsession with lotteries transmogrified into a vision that surely is the dark side of the doctrine of predestination:

And thus it appeareth to me that our Lord hath secreted unto His Scripture a texte which hitherto had not been revealed to me but which tonight hath come cleer, namely, that God doth play dice with His Universe.

From ye Cradle to ye Grave, a Man's life is predetermined in accordance with ye divine Lawe of Chance. Ye application of His Lawe of Chance properly belongs to God; He is ye only Lawemaker. But He hathe given power and gifts to man to interprett his Lawe and to establish on Earthe ye vessels through which His Lawe of Chance can be expressed.

And therefore, an Elder may prescribe ye pleasures and ye penaltyes so long as ye recipients thereof be chosen in accordance with ye Lawe of Chance.

I was startled by the sound of Ozzie barking.

“What's wrong, Oz?” I called out as I put the booklet on my bed and sat up. He barked again.

I found Ozzie in the kitchen, facing the back door. “What do you hear?” I said, patting him on the head.

He wagged his tail and then trotted into the living room. I stared at the back door for a moment and then followed him into the living room. He was standing by the window, his body tense, his head slightly cocked. I peered out the window. The street was empty.

Ozzie looked up at me and then moved over to the couch. He curled up on the floor, resting his head on his front paws.

I glanced at my briefcase resting against the coffee table. There was work in there, but it could wait.

“C'mon, Oz. Keep me company.”

He followed me into the bedroom and settled down by the foot of the bed. I picked up the booklet and found my place:

The minister found enthusiastic accomplices among the original four Elders who had met with him to establish the first lottery in 1685. The awful vicissitudes of Canaan must have forced each of them to search for an answer to the riddle of their sad village. As Reverend Marvell recorded in his diary:

Swearing a Solemne Oathe of Secrecy, wee professed ourselves fellow members of Christ, for His worke wee have in hand, it is by mutuall consent through a speciall overruleing providence.

By 1694, all lottery drawings were conducted in secret, and the results of the drawings were carried out in secret. No one in Canaan could any longer be sure whether his good luck or misfortune was the work of God or the result of the lottery of Canaan, administered in secrecy by the church Elders. A name would be selected by lot, and then a series of drawings would determine the precise fate of the target of the lottery. According to hints in Reverend Marvell's diary, the lottery drawings for one person could last from midnight until the break of dawn.

Although the church records continued to record the felicities and ignominies of the Canaanites, no longer do they indicate the cause of the origins of those achievements or punishments. We learn of Richard Brown being publicly whipped, but hear not for what. We learn of Katherine Aimes forced to stand on the church green wearing on her breast the shameful scarlet letter which Hawthorne has so poignantly immortalized in his story about Hester Prynne. But did she commit adultery? And if she did so sin, was she led to sin by her own impurity or by the silent machinations of the Elders of Canaan? The church records are silent and Reverend Marvell's diary contains nary a hint.