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By Root 959 0

with all the melodrama of undergraduate training, of Keats’s odes, or of his “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” for here I was, perhaps the only scholar in the world who had traced the work of an obscure clerk from London to Massachusetts. I could sense all the movements in his life, his determination to remake his life before it was too late, to go west to the colony instead of east, where surely his East India clerkship could have led him. I felt the same psychic bond with Edward Easton that Keats did with the revelers on the Grecian urn. He became a footnote in my thesis, but an assurance to me that my research in that era was somehow blessed. Of all the billions of births, the fires and floodings that separate me and my time from Easton and his, that the mundane work of this lone man should be preserved struck me as nothing less than miraculous and conferred on me a kind of wonderstruck confidence.

For most English colonists and certainly for Indian sachems, however, the 1660s was a win-or-die decade. So while Edward Easton was cutting trees down to stumps, raking his field, sowing his wife’s fertile womb, prizing rocks from the ground and hauling them to build a wall, burying his firstborn, trading wool stockings and blankets for herbs with the Nipmuc, the Wampanoag chief, Metacomet (whom the colonists renamed Philip), was suing and skirmishing to oust alien usurpers, and the French habitants were selling flintlocks to Ninigret, sachem of the Narragansett, in hopes of stirring up anti-English riots.

In 1671, on September 29, the day that Hannah turned a year old and first toddled far enough away by herself to have to be brought back by a solicitous Nipmuc, and the day that, in a cold drafty hall in distant Plymouth, the colonial government curtailed the sovereign powers of the Wampanoag and humiliated the proud King Philip by imposing a fine of one hundred pounds for violating their laws, Edward Easton, while in his outdoor privy savoring the poetic paradox in an imported, treasured copy of Paradise Lost and the physical paradox of constipation’s painful pleasures, died of a bee sting.

OF HER MOTHER, the twenty-two-year-old widow whom Hannah lost when the Nipmuc laid siege to Brookfield in the scorched month of August 1675, she had one long, disturbing memory.

Rebecca Easton loved to sing. She sang psalms by the light of a fish-oil lamp, always to the same five or six tunes. And though she could neither read the words to the psalms nor the notes to the tunes that Edward, perhaps in a rare desperately nostalgic moment, had scribbled on the back cover of the Psalter, she taught the child to sing antiphonally with her.

Hannah’s memory is of one such psalm-singing night, their last one. Rebecca by the window, her neck long and arched, her throat throbbing with song. A voice so strong and sweet that it softens the sternest spiritual phrases into voluptuous pleas. The greasy, pale light of the lamp; the acute smell of the lamp oil. Rebecca singing each line by herself first, then nodding to encourage Hannah; Hannah repeating the line in a quavery, unformed voice. But, Hannah remembers, and this can never be separated from the angelic choir pouring from her mother’s breast, there are faces at the window.

Of course, the memory coalesces several frames into a single emblematic moment. The child sees; the mother does not. The strangers are listening, tomahawks held high, about to smash the window and door, but they are stilled in midflight. The Indians know these songs, especially the women who sit in the rear of the church, walking in and out during the sermons but rising with the congregation to sing. Her memory is a window, letting in the fecundity of an unfenced world.

She has also what she calls sightings, rather than memories, of that early childhood on the farm. Rebecca and some Indian helpers must farm alone; Rebecca is a widow. A Nipmuc woman teaching her to clean and dress deerskin. A boy-child promising to grow for her the plumpest squashes and pumpkins, the crispest beans, the brightest corn. A Nipmuc