Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [10]
King Philip changed Hannah’s life as completely and as forcefully as King Charles II of England had changed her father’s.
All through June and July of 1675, paranoia traveled up and down the Bay Path. Philip was arming his warriors for an all-out war! Wampanoag were breaking into and entering colonists’ houses in Swansea and raiding farms abandoned on the thin, frayed neck of peninsular land. Isolated farmers were gathered up and garrisoned, losing their crops and cattle to the marauders. Messengers from Governor Winslow of Plymouth fanned their frenzy. Philip’s men were looting and burning Middleborough, Dartmouth, Plymouth. The heathens were axing, scalping, abducting the decent Christian men and women and children of Mendon.
Hannah dreamed of Philip pressing his war-roused face at the window. Why not? Stray troopers coming through spoke of Philip as though he were an omnipresent phantom. One moment he was staking out pease fields, next moment he was fortifying snake-crowded swamps. And the next, he was impaling scalped heads and slashing the bulging sacs of milch cows.
Then, on the night of the second of August, Philip’s War came to the Easton hearth in the person of Rebecca’s Nipmuc lover. If he had intended the marking as disguise, it didn’t work. Hannah knew him as her inadmissible father, the only man she’d ever seen her mother with. The child raised her hand. The mother stopped singing, and slowly turned around.
This is the night Hannah has willed herself not to remember. What happened survives only as Rebecca’s neighbors’ gossip, embellished with the speculations of scholars. The lover, now painted and feathered as befits a warrior, comes to woo her one last time. And Rebecca surprises him. Reading Hannah’s eyes, she stands and slowly turns, facing the window without surprise or terror. She stands on a reed rug by the window, the very window where Hannah remembers her having led women and children through psalms, and peels her white, radiant body out of the Puritan widow’s somber bodice and skirt as a viper sheds skin before wriggling into the brush. Her body is thick, strong, the flesh streaked and bruised, trussed with undergarments.
The Nipmuc enters the cabin, suddenly immense in his full battle regalia. He cradles the whimpering Easton hound under one arm.
Rebecca scoops Hannah out of her bed, clasps her and weeps as though the child were dead. The Nipmuc jerks his arm, the hound lurches, and a spume of blood leaps from his arms across the table. He swabs Rebecca’s old garments in the blood, smears them with his feet over the floor, stabs holes in the cloth as they darken with blood, then hands her something new and Indian and clean to wear.
Outside, a Nipmuc woman who had taught her to sew deerskin into breeches, takes the child. Hannah watches the cabin grow small, and a fireball erupt from the spilled fish-oil lamp, as Rebecca and the Nipmuc take off for the river, and the woman, running hard and low to the ground, cuts into the woods, along the path to the Fitch farm half a mile away. She does not cry, and the vow she makes, bobbing in the arms of the nameless woman she has known all her life, to remain silent about this night, to sustain her mother in the ultimate lie, the ultimate unnatural crime of Puritan life, she will keep for sixty years.
Hannah’s subsequent years can be read as a sermon on any topic, as proof of any interpretation. But she wills the memory of this night away; she will orphan herself to that memory, deny its existence, for that is the way her mother has planned it. She alone knows the nature of her mother’s disappearance; she must carry the