Flight of the Sparrow (13 page)

Mary becomes gradually aware that a man is following her around the village. When Weetamoo sends her to fetch water or gather wood, Mary sees him skulking behind her. Finally she identifies him as Monoco. He has a strong nose and wide brow, smooth skin and a long neck. He might be handsome except for his ruined left eye, which is sunken deep in its socket. He does not speak to Mary. Yet when she glances in his direction, he gives her a leering grin. His face reminds her of a picture of the Devil she once saw in a book of Joseph’s. She makes a point of avoiding the lonely places at the edge of camp, places where the forest rises up to block the sun, where she cannot be seen.

One afternoon, as she gets water from the river, Mary sees Monoco sitting with Quinnapin under a tree. The two men are laughing and talking, smoking long pipes of tobacco, the spicy scent drifting on the
wind. As she approaches, they stop talking and study her. The hairs on her neck rise. She feels as a hunted deer must feel—wary and doomed. She quickens her pace and ducks inside the shelter, where Weetamoo sits playing with her babe. Mary has learned that he is nearly four months old, a solemn black-haired boy whose dark gaze has often fallen on her. Weetamoo has unwrapped him from his cradleboard and is caressing his arms and legs, moving them in some rhythm Mary cannot follow. He looks too thin, yet he chortles heartily. She thinks immediately of Sarah and feels a terrible grief. She turns away and bumps into Monoco, who has followed her into the wetu. Quinnapin stands behind him, grinning.

Monoco grasps her shoulders and takes a strand of her hair between his fingers. Weetamoo looks up from her child and says something to him. He responds with a string of Indian words. His tone is eager but deferential.

“Matta!”
Weetamoo says sharply.
“Monchish!”

Quinnapin laughs. Monoco drops Mary’s hair and backs away. His expression reminds Mary of a small boy whose knuckles have been rapped. She is shocked at what she has just seen—a man publicly chastised by a woman. It would never happen in Lancaster.

Mary looks at Weetamoo, who is once again absorbed with her babe. She is puzzled that she can treat a man with such insolence and suffer no public rebuke. Yet Mary senses that she has in some way saved her from a disagreeable fate. She feels a welling, if reluctant, gratitude, which she has no idea how to express.

•   •   •

F
or a week, the village lies under a spell of quietude. Then a great restiveness begins. The women go about their tasks with quickened pace. The men gather at dawn in small groups and disappear into the forest, returning with freshly killed animals. The new vitality is infectious—Mary feels her own slothfulness fall away and performs her assigned tasks with new liveliness and vigor. She
begins to understand Weetamoo’s words and grows alert to her moods. The woman has the capricious temper of a tyrant—content one minute and vexed the next. Mary forages for wood, fetches water, scrapes hides, and grinds corn on a stone. She tends the fire, searches for groundnuts and berries. She repairs the great mats that line the interior of the wetu, weaving bulrushes and hemp with a double-pointed needle made from the split rib of a deer. She smokes squirrel meat and sweeps the wetu’s earthen floor with a pine branch many times each day. Her mind quickens and she casts aside her grief.

It is the Bible, she tells herself. God’s word has come down upon her like rain on a parched desert. The knowledge that it lies in her pocket calms her as she works.

When Weetamoo gives her permission, Mary goes in search of her children, but the only person from Lancaster she finds is Ann Joslin, who is hugely swollen with her unborn child. Mary feels a rush of pity when she sees her sitting by the path between two elderly Indian women, picking nits out of her daughter Beatrice’s hair. Mary thinks of the difficult final days before she brought forth her own children. She was clumsy and uncomfortable all the time.

“Good day, Goody Joslin,” Mary says, hoping the familiar greeting will cheer her. “You look well.” Though, in fact, she does not. Her cheeks are sunken, her eyes furtive; her arms beneath the dirty sleeves of her linsey-woolsey dress are little more than bones. Mary draws a scrap of dried corn cake from the bottom of her pocket and holds it out. Ann takes it, glancing warily at the two Indian women.

“Have they worked you very hard?” Mary asks.

Ann shakes her head. “They have given me little to do. Yet they do not allow me out of their sight.” She touches her belly. “I believe they wait for the child.” The whites of her eyes are yellow, like scraps
of old parchment. “I fear they will take him from me once he is born. They have a special fondness for the flesh of—”

“Come,” Mary says quickly. “Let us talk.” She picks up Beatrice, who does not protest, and walks a short way up the path. Ann follows. The girl’s weight is a sweet burden in Mary’s arms, reminding her of Sarah.

“How long before you deliver your babe?” Mary knows Ann must be terrified of the ordeal ahead. A woman’s travail is dangerous enough in a civilized English home.

“A week, I think. Not more than two.”

Mary tries to reassure her. She tells her that she will seek Weetamoo’s permission to attend her labor. That she will pray for a safe delivery, for the health of the babe. Ann nods respectfully, but her attention is scattered and fitful. Finally, she confides in a whisper that she plans to escape and make her way home.

Mary stares at her. “You cannot mean that. We are at least thirty miles from an English town.” She takes her arm, as if to hold her. “There are hills to climb and rivers to cross. You cannot hope to survive by yourself.”

“I have begged them to let me go.” Ann’s voice is clogged with tears, though Mary sees none on her face. “All they do is mock me. I can bear it no longer.”

Mary wonders if Ann has gone mad. This is more than a woman’s ordinary fretfulness as she nears her time. “You must not flee. For the child’s sake, if not your own. It would be a terrible sin.”

Ann looks at her as if her words are nonsense. “What matter is sin? God has abandoned us.”

The words fall like a blow. Mary feels suddenly afraid. “Ann, you are not well. Your spirit and your body are feeble. You must listen.” She sets Beatrice on the ground, draws the Bible from her pocket and begins to read Psalm Twenty-seven aloud. Ann stands with her head bowed, Beatrice slumped against her skirts. When
Mary is done, she looks up and sees immediately that Ann has not absorbed the words, for she is shaking her head. “I shall not see you again,” she whispers.

“No! You must not speak so.” Mary cups Ann’s face between her hands. Her fingers make jagged streaks in the grime. “You must wait upon the Lord.”

Ann sags away.

“Promise me,” Mary says. “Say you will wait upon the Lord’s deliverance.”

Still, Ann says nothing, but stands gazing at the wetus and the frozen river beyond.

•   •   •

W
eetamoo kicks Mary awake early the next morning and orders her to fetch water. As Mary hurries through the village, she sees women packing blankets and pots and kettles and loading them into baskets and onto small sleds. When she returns, Weetamoo orders her to help Alawa roll up the sleeping skins and remove the wall coverings inside the wetu. Mary works diligently to quickly untie the great woven reed mats. Her heart is beating too fast. She senses the sluice of excitement and worry swirling around her, feels part of it. Soon only empty shelters remain.

Alawa tells her that everyone is leaving Menameset. Mary feels a rush of panic. The longer she stays in one place, the greater the opportunity to find her children. And the greater likelihood they will be rescued.

“No,” she says. “I cannot go.” She shakes her head and waves her hands in the air to demonstrate her urgency. She goes to Weetamoo and begs to be allowed to stay. “Leave me here under guard,” she says. “I will only hamper your travels.” She hunches over and takes a few shuffling steps to demonstrate how weak and slow she will be on the trail.

Without warning, Weetamoo slaps her across the face. The
blow is so hard, Mary staggers back and nearly falls. When she claps her hand over her stinging cheek, Weetamoo yanks it away and strikes her again, shouting words Mary cannot understand. But she doesn’t need words to know her life depends on Weetamoo, that she must do her bidding to keep it.

Her heart fills with rage as she fills the large carrying baskets under Weetamoo’s direction—some with corn, some with skins, some with small pots and pouches of herbs and tobacco. She has never been treated so cruelly, certainly not by another woman. It is unnatural, a perversion of God’s order,
she thinks
.
She works with a cold fury, yet it occurs to her late that morning that this indignity is what Bess suffers in her indenture. What slaves everywhere suffer. Her positions as minister’s wife and the daughter of Lancaster’s richest landowner have protected her from perceiving this. Now she is no longer a woman but a slave. She has become a beast of burden, an object to be used and discarded at the whim of her mistress.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

They
set out at midday. The sky is gray with low clouds. Mary is given a tall basket filled with corn. Alawa shows her how to carry it on her back and secure it with a strap across her forehead. Mary walks behind her on the trail, the last in Weetamoo’s group and burdened with the heaviest basket. Her feet hurt and pain runs up and down her arms and legs. Her head aches from the pressure of the strap and soon she is so dizzy she has to stop and lean against a tree so the world will stop whirling. When Weetamoo happens to turn and see her, she shouts and brandishes her club. Mary forces herself to continue walking.

Trees rise like black pikes against the sky. It seems to Mary that the heavens are always gray in this bleak season, always threatening snow. She tries to pray. She thinks about the Israelites who wandered forty years in the wilderness, remembers how they struggled to be faithful to the Lord. How wickedly they strayed. She reminds herself that her chief task is to stay vigilant every moment so that evil will not overtake her while she busies herself with living.

At sunset they come to a clearing. It is a barren place—a ridge
of snow-covered rocks with no trees or hills to break the wind. The Indians mill around, trampling resting places into the snow, and Mary realizes that they’ve stopped for the night. The women pile up pine boughs to lean against and then build fires and take out mats and skins from their packs.

Weetamoo directs Alawa and Mary to build a small shelter of mats, barely big enough for Quinnapin and herself and their infant son. Then she shoos them away. Alawa builds a fire and scoops out a hollow in the snow nearby, and she and Mary huddle together under blankets. Snow clings in clumps to Mary’s back and thighs. Her dress is wet from hem to waist, and she is so cold she cannot stop shaking. She edges close to Alawa for warmth, curling up next to her, trying to sleep. Alawa’s breathing slows and deepens, yet Mary cannot relax. After a while, she takes out her Bible and tries to read a few lines by the fire but the light is not sufficient. She finally dozes with her head on her knees. When she wakes in the morning, her arms and legs have stiffened so that she can barely move.

Weetamoo seems to have forgotten her. She does not give her orders or access to the stew pot. Mary must fend for herself or starve, so she walks through the camp, lighting on scraps of food—a few crumbs of corn cake here, some dried berries there, a chestnut begged from an old woman.

She searches for Ann Joslin to see how she fares, but she is not in camp. Later, Alawa tells Mary that when the Indians left Menameset, they divided into several groups and went in different directions, taking their captives with them. Mary wonders which direction her children have gone and when she will see Ann again. It distresses her that she may not be able to keep her promise to attend her labor.

The men come and go. She assumes they are hunting, but their luck must be very poor, for there is no sweet smoke of roasting game, no cries of pleasure that would accompany a successful hunting party’s return. In fact, the quiet is profoundly unsettling.

Near sunset, a warrior comes into the camp. Mary is cheered to see that her sister Hannah’s son, John, is among the party. She sees him from a distance—his face is smeared with dirt, but his eyes are bright and he does not have the lean look of the hungry about him yet. She follows him and finds him playing a game with pebbles on a patch of earth cleared of snow. When she inquires, he tells her that his master’s sons taught it to him.

“You must be wary of taking their customs,” Mary chides. “Be firm in the Lord lest you turn heathen. The Devil is very cunning.”

He nods but does not look at her. He seems completely absorbed in his game.

“Have you seen your mother?” The thought of Hannah makes her ache, for she has not laid eyes on her since the day of the attack.

John shakes his head and then, suddenly, drops his pebbles and breaks into tears. Mary touches his shoulder, wishing she had taken more care in speaking. “What troubles you?” she asks gently.