Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [13]
Not time-travel, he said. Time-retrieval, to put it in my terms.
5
ON SATURDAY, Hannah was moved again.
Nothing mattered. Not the slow, clumsy tenderness of the arthritic couple, Robert and Susannah Fitch, whose lives she had burst into Friday night. Not the screaming and cursing of their grown son, Thomas, who had ridden out with a parley party very early in the morning of that same Friday and whom Captain Ephraim Curtis rescued from a Nipmuc ambush in a defile and brought back, grievously bleeding. Thomas Fitch would never walk again.
The people of Brookfield couldn’t believe the betrayal. The Nipmuc were good children of God, loyal to the King. They feared Wampanoag just like everyone else. The families of Brookfield, or Quabaug, as they preferred to call it, all had friends among the Nipmuc, their wandering animals were often returned by Indians, and no white man, encountering an Indian in his fields, or by the river, ever raised his rifle or felt afraid. This whole dispute was unimaginable.
“French,” said some.
Hannah kept her feelings—what must it have been but the world’s harvest of sorrow and confusion, to be later winnowed into rancor and gratitude?—to herself. Shock disguised itself as serenity. She had not spoken, but she was, briefly, the center of everyone’s concern. The little innocent, torn by a savage from her mother’s cold breast, cruelly dumped by a guilty heathen, doubtless thinking it would gain him some credit in the afterlife, on a neighbor’s doorstep.
“Only, we’re not papists,” cried Henry Young. “God has taken his measure. He who would slay the mother and spare the child is crueler than any brute animal.”
When flaming arrows came through the roof of the house, she helped carry out canisters of precious salt, sugar and oil, and prayed with her new parents for divine Providence, then hurried with them behind Thomas’s litter to a large, garrisoned house on the hill.
The two long days and longer nights of Brookfield’s siege she bore as though the heat of eighty bodies huddled too close, the stench of their fear, the war whoops and burning roofs and musket fire were ordinary excesses of summer weather. Henry Young, rallying the defenders, paid with his life for drawing too close to a window.
Lucas Thorpe, a tall, yellow-haired boy who’d survived the same ambush that nearly killed Thomas Fitch and distinguished himself by his enthusiasm for vengeance, volunteered to run to Marlborough for reinforcements. Everyone feared their vaunted friendship with the Nipmuc would be believed, and the columns of relief would bypass Brookfield unless word of their distress got out. During a respite in the fighting, Lucas slipped out the back of the house. She watched, almost praying for the same sudden fate that had befallen Henry Young, as the boy grew small in the brush. And then, before he reached the woods, a dozen tall Nipmuc braves stood, and the colonists watched the boy turning and twisting, shouting but sending no message as the clubs fell upon his head and shoulders. He collapsed, and one brave dipped down with him, out of sight. When he next stood, he held the yellow patch in his hand, and now they could all hear the shouts, even over Goodwife Thorpe’s screaming, and then the braves decapitated the corpse and passed the head among them, throwing it as a sport more than a trophy.
The only man truly to serve as her father was somewhere out there in the dark, pumping arrows into the garrison, or perhaps kicking a boy’s head in an open field in full view of the house. She knew that her mother might be with him or might be inside one of the tents the colonists had boasted of going out to give a taste of eternal hellfire, the moment their liberators came.
The secret dynamic of Puritanism had at last taken flesh. Now we know, just when we had begun to doubt it and to