She tried to crane her neck around to see what lay behind them, but his loping walk caused her to run hazardously down the hill, and she stumbled in her effort to match his long strides. He whistled John from the barn and whispered to him urgently, gesturing towards the river, and placed a silencing hand over John’s arm when the younger man’s eyes went big and round. Once inside, Thomas bolted the door, posting himself at the open window. When Martha came to stand next to him, he pointed back to the embankment where they had talked moments before. She observed nothing at first and then she saw a slight shifting of the landscape at the crest; dun-colored shapes moving in concert, heaving subtly as though the earth itself had learned to crawl.
Patience, seeing the men returned to the house, served up the midday meal, a thin ladle of soup with dried deer meat and the last of the bread baked days before. She chatted on happily about the leeks brought from the river and the fineness of the weather, of her absent husband, and of the seedlings coming up in the garden, unaware of the guarded looks passing between Thomas and John, and of the alarm that kept Martha rigid and silent in her chair. Thomas sat closest to the door with the flintlock at arm’s length and soon the only sounds were of the scraping of spoons against the pewter.
Her bowl finally empty, Patience stood and stretched with her knuckles against the small of her back. She looked at Martha and, frowning, asked, “Are you ill? What’s the matter?” Martha’s eyes tracked instinctively to the window, and before anyone could stop her, Patience strode to the door, slipped the bolt, and opened it wide. She screamed and staggered backwards, her arms flailing wildly in front of her. Both men stood from the table with such force that their chairs upended behind them. With astonishing speed Thomas pushed Patience roughly aside and stood, his flintlock raised, at the open door.
Thrusting the children under the table, Martha planted herself protectively in front of Patience, waving her farther back into the house. She felt a rapid, hot breath at her neck and turned to see John standing next to her, quaking and sweating, with a small ax in one hand and a large-tined fork in the other.
Patience, her voice shrill with terror, cried out, “They will kill us, Thomas…” He raised one hand sharply to her to be quiet but kept the long sights of the rifle pointed into the yard. Martha braced herself for the blast from the barrel, but after a moment there was no explosion. She stepped closer to the table, thinking to arm herself with a knife, and from her new vantage point she could see beyond Thomas’s bulk into the yard.
A man stood motionless and alone not twenty feet from the door. He was wrapped in doeskin and furs, his chest and arms naked, a club with a knotted head hanging at his side, and on his skin were the angry, festering sores of the plague. The man watched them watching him until the sound of Joanna’s voice, frightened and plaintive, floated out of the house. The man’s eyes drifted sideways and tracked over the windows and roofline, all the way to the barn, and then returned to stare at Thomas. A racking chill suddenly passed through the man’s body and he coughed heavily, pulling his furs more tightly around himself. He extended his arm out for a moment before bringing his fingers up to his mouth. When no one in the house moved, he repeated the gesture.
Without taking his eyes from the man, Thomas said quietly over his shoulders, “Missus, go and put whatever food is on the table into a sack and bring it fast to me.”
The beginning sounds of protest from Patience brought a swift black look from Thomas. She quickly pulled the children from under the table and ran for her bedroom, desperately slamming the door behind her. With shaking hands, Martha scooped the remains of bread and meat into a cloth and handed the parcel to Thomas, who walked without hesitation into the yard. Ignoring John’s insistent tugging at her skirt and hissing into her ear, “Stay in the house or yer get yerself killed…,” Martha moved forward to stand in the doorway. She watched Thomas hold out the parcel, waiting calmly and patiently for the food to be taken.
The man in the yard had not retreated at Thomas’s advance. Rather, he had planted one leg behind the other, tilting himself backwards to take in the Welshman’s height. The man himself was not tall—Martha guessed him to be in fact shorter than herself—but there was a straightening of his spine and his arm extended outward, fingers encircling the sack with a gentle, almost delicate touch. The sack disappeared inside the folds of the doeskin, and slowly turning without a word or glance, he disappeared into the woody bracken opposite the entrance to the road.
Martha looked back at John standing in the middle of the room, his weapons held aloft. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said, “put down the ax. Did y’think to cleave him in two and then eat him?” He sat heavily in a chair, placing the fork back on the table.
Thomas closed and bolted the door and took up his post again at the window. After a time he carefully shut and locked the sash in its casing, and she came to stand next to him, waiting for him to speak.
“That Indian was Wampanoag on his way back north, if he weren’t to die of the pox first,” he said. His breath appeared and reappeared on the glass in veiled patches. “Had they been Abenaki it’s likely you and I wouldn’t be here talking. They were all with plague or they’d not be begging.”
“They…?” she asked, startled. To her eyes there had been only one man in the yard.
“There were half a dozen more in the woods not forty feet away,” he answered.
She pressed her nose closer to the glass and scanned the woods for movement. “Will they come back?”
He shrugged and passed his hands over his eyes. She studied his profile, the darkened flesh trenched beneath his eyes and the scar that split one brow in two. “Am I Gelert?” she asked. He turned to her, and she asked again, “The hound killed by his master? You said the tale was about me.”
“No,” he answered. “You’re not Gelert.” His breath was moist in her face, scented with wild river onions, green and pungent, but he soon turned back to watch the woods and he didn’t speak to her again for hours.
THE MAY WINDS brought rain from the direction of Boston, the air sharpened with the taint of salt water, and Daniel Taylor appeared on such a morning through undulating currents of dampened air, his canvas coat turned black and heavy from the wet. He arrived as Martha and Patience stood in the yard, quickly gathering in the washing that had been hung to dry earlier that morning when the sun had burned free of the clouds. The women had mistaken the crashing and rumbling of the carter’s wagon as approaching thunder until they saw the barrel-chested gelding appear steaming and straining over the crest of the road.
Patience covered her face with her apron and sobbed at the sight of him. At his first embrace he said to her, “Now, now, my own little wife, I am home. Come see what I’ve brought you.” He carried into the house bundle after bundle of cloth as well as hides, tools, and foodstuffs: two barrels of small beer, a firkin of ale, one large keg of wheat, two cones of sugar, and a caged cockerel.
He proudly pulled out crates of woolens and linens for new shifts, caps, and aprons, smiling at his wife’s delighted surprise. In a friendly hug, he yanked up a startled Joanna, frightened at the appearance of this strange, unshaven man, but she quickly smiled when Daniel showed her a corncob poppet made, he said, by a Carribee slave. Seeing Will standing alone and frowning at his own lack of presents, Daniel set Joanna down and soberly gestured for his son to approach. With a serious face he pulled from a bag a tiny ax and presented it to the boy, as though the gift were the rarest of finds. Will yelled a full-throated cry and ran from the house, bringing laughter from everyone but John, who said, shaking his head, “Best hide the new rooster.”
Daniel sat and called for food and in between bites of his dinner rattled off an account of his travels. “I’ve been as far north as Salisbury and hope to go even farther on the next leg, perhaps as far as Portsmouth if there be enough clearing of woodlands up past Strawberry Bank. You can’t believe the farmsteads opening up between Casco Bay and Kittery. Pelts, timber, fish—more than one man can trap or catch in a lifetime.” His round and sympathetic face clouded only once, when he spoke of the whispering up and down the coast of Abenaki Indians chafing at the land and furs taken by the Englishers, and of the raids on settlements lying vulnerably close to the edge of the forests.
“It’s the French north of the Eastward,” he said, scratching at his scalp still burning from the lye soap he had used to kill the lice he had picked up in some bedstead in Boston. “They’re stirring and stirring the pot, making friends with the heathens so they’ll knock us about the head and drive us all the way back to England.” Patience began to cry again, and with a few words Thomas related the visit by the Wampanoag man and of the plague that had visited both colonist and Indian alike. Daniel made placating sounds, distracting his wife by saying, “Here, look, Patience. Have you seen the bowls I have brought you? Look how bright the pewter is.”
Martha made panbread for the evening supper with the new flour, molding a tender blanket to hold the old rooster that, over the protestations of Will, who wanted to try his new ax on the bird, was butchered and dressed by John within the space of an hour. Patience waited impatiently for Daniel to finish his portion and retire with her to bed, but he didn’t leave until he had generously shared the new ale, not twice, but three times with John and Thomas. When he finally took his wife’s hand, she led him off to their room saying, “Oh, Daniel. It’s been such a struggle managing all by myself.”
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