Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [8]
I knew my own family’s names and fragments of rumored history, of course. When I got to England, I went straight to the shipping records, the baptismal records, the recordings of deeds. Seeing the names of relatives, reading of their deaths and births and marriages all placed me within a context that I found somehow thrilling, as though nothing in the universe is ever lost, no gesture is futile. I’ve since then doubted the significance of many of those innocent discoveries, but seeing those “Salem Bibi’s Stuffs” boxes on the floor of the maritime museum, those Mughal paintings, brought the importance of those feelings back.
A twenty-year-old girl, really, contemplating her place in the universe and the ways of the world had appropriated an ancestor, a man who had gone before her, and though he was writing of strangers, she cherished his observations like an intimate letter from home:
A petty ruler on the Coromandel Coast of India is given the gifts of armour, a wool coat and a spying glass.
A ship on its way to Masulipatnam is stocked with 1420 hogs and 250 oxen.
The mother of a factor who died on board a Company vessel sailing home from Fort St. George is denied the diamonds she claims he was bringing back for her.
A cabin-boy is whipped and his lacerations brined for having stolen a vial of musk.
Did the cabin boy live to be a sea captain? Did the petty ruler wear his bribe to his next battle and did the armor save his skin? Was Edward Easton’s mind so demented with details that he fled to the wilderness? Or did he merely look up and out the grimy window, see the forest of mastheads and yard-arms on the river and the white Crosses of St. George fluttering like birds on the Company’s pennants and finally walk away from his old self? As his wife and his daughter would do, again and again.
Edward Easton arrived in Boston with sufficient skills and savings to make him desirable as a son-in-law to any Boston patriarch with too many daughters, but within weeks he bought himself a horse and cantered westward. Was it disgust with the old life, or was he enticed by a new, wholly imagined one that drove him away from safe and stable port towns like Boston and Salem? Did the Puritans, with their gloomy quest for godliness, hold for him more terror—as, later, they would for Hannah—than the presumed Satan who reigned over Pennacook, Abnaki and Nipmuc?
What is known is that he headed for the outer rings of settlements, stopping over first in Billerica, then in Chelmsford, then in Lancaster—where he was invited to sup at the home of John White, the wealthy landholder, and offered a modest bookkeeping job by White’s son-in-law, the Reverend Joseph Rowlandson, Lancaster’s first minister—then in Worcester, and finally either running out of energy or finding in Brookfield the dreamscape for starting over.
For this accidental frontiersman, the 1660s was a decade of self-transformation. Like an alchemist who turns dross into gold, he hardened his slack and bookish body into the wiriness of a tiller, transformed the forest into farmland, and disenchantment into desire. And when desire grew carnal and kept him awake all the summer nights of 1668, he married, after perfunctory courtship, the Walkers’ bonny lass, strong and handsome, even comely, he wrote in that angular hand, with domestic skills and teachable aptitudes worthy of a freeborn woman of this new land.
He felt he might give her twenty years of husbandly service, begetting upon her a brood of worthy offspring. Already, he was cultivating a second career as village selectman.
I gasped the moment I opened Brookfield town registries and saw the same angular hand I’d known from Leadenhall. I thought then,