Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [20]
Hannah cringed from the memory of her own dread-filled hour. Over and over, Rebecca, with one saucy leap onto her lover’s white horse, defected from Zion, defected from family love.
Pray, dear Hester, do go on.
Hester caught the flicker and felt encouraged to intone her favorite passage about a modest, decent woman’s obscene afflictions. “Now is the dreadful hour come …,” she started.
Did Hannah’s rage target the Providence that had allowed a family to be broken up by death and desertion as well as by her mother? Or had the twin rage begun its process of coalescence, entwined in the dense embroidery of her life?
“Some in our house were fighting for their lives,” Hester read on, her thin voice deepening with anticipation of violence, “others wallowing in their blood, the house on fire over heads, and the bloody heathen ready to knock us on the head if we stirred out …”
Hannah heard again the Nipmuc war cries and Thomas Fitch’s screams. Flames singed the clean walls of the garrison on the hill. Bullets flew into the room, erratic as bats, and nested in infants’ bowels and toddlers’ kneecaps.
“… Thus we were butchered by those merciless heathens, standing amazed, with the blood running down to our heels …”
Guard yourself against aliens, Hester’s voice suggested. Hannah pulled her quilt tight over her head. The godless are invading the garden that the diligent have cleared from the forest primeval.
Hester put down her book. “Tell me what it was really like, Hannah. They say when you have these spells … you’re remembering.”
“They?”
“The boys at the forge. You’re a great topic of speculation, Hannah Easton.”
She had always thought of herself as one who watched, who had the privilege of remaining outside family or society, by virtue of her loss and secret. She knew there had already been inquiries of possible marriage and that her foster father had politely intervened.
“Mrs. Rowlandson’s account is such as the common press should wish of savages and gentlewomen alike,” said Hannah. “Five years I dwelled in the forest and knew the forest and all its dwellers as a friend. And for perhaps a week, but especially for two days and nights, I knew it as a tempest. I count no man as my friend, nor as my enemy.”
Then Rebecca stepped out of Hannah’s memory, and spoke. Hannah was an infant again. And again Rebecca was initiating her daughter into a whispered, subversive alphabet. “A is for Act, my daughter!”
Hester heard Hannah babble deliriously from inside her quilted cave and fetched Susannah.
“B is for Boldness,” Hannah pledged. “C is for Character. D is for Dissent, E is for Ecstasy, F is for Forage …”
And I, thought Hester, remembering the women who wore it emblazoned on their sleeves, is for Indian lover.
“I is for Independence,” said Hannah.
The next morning Hannah came down as though she had been in bed only overnight and not a month and a half of nights. Her recovery was miraculous.
I do not choose the word carelessly. If God can speak through a bee sting, why cannot He speak through the ghost of life-loving Rebecca?
8
OF THE next eight years in the Fitch household, only one record exists. No, I take that back; an asset hunter knows not to be arrogant, to keep pushing. You never know what might be out there. From those eight years, I have found one relevant exchange of letters. These are letters written not by her nor to her, but about her.
The first is dated June 15, 1686. It is addressed to Robert Fitch by William Pynchon, an innkeeper in Springfield, asking on behalf of his son, Solomon, and in the formulaic phrases of his time, leave for Solomon to court Hannah. His public house,