The Wolves of Andover

CHAPTER 13

THE FIRST WEEK of June, Daniel returned to his carting, the gelding plodding slowly past the burgeoning fields, shaking his tufted head against the heavy leads to the wagon. Martha stood with Patience at the door as Daniel waved cheerfully, exuberantly, to his wife and children. She passed her arm supportively around her cousin’s broadening waist, whispering to her all of the choice things Daniel would bring back to them—a bit of lace, a brace of pewter bowls—but five days would pass before Patience stopped sulking and soaking her pillow at night with tears. Martha could often hear her cousin’s indulgent weeping as she lay in bed trying to find sleep, and most nights Will would creep into Martha’s room, poking her with a finger until she relented by making room for him within the hollow of her arms. Daniel had promised to be home by the middle of July to see Patience through her birthing. Martha never spoke to him of her nagging fears about an early and difficult lying-in, thinking that to speak of such things would give substance to unhappy possibilities.

On the sixth day, Martha looked at her cousin sitting mournfully at the table, eyes glazed with tears and frowning into the palm of her hand, and said abruptly, “Right, then. I’ve never seen a woman more in need of a potted cheese.”

Patience furrowed her brows. “What?” she asked, dropping the hand from her chin.

“To market, cousin,” Martha said, smiling, wrapping a cloak around her shoulders. “And I’ll give you a quarter hour to comb your hair and wash your face or you’ll disgrace us all.”

Within the half hour, the cart rattled from the yard, Patience sitting next to John, her face for the first time bright and hopeful, while Martha sat in the back with Will and Joanna. Thomas had come out from the barn to watch them go, his eyes settling on her at the last. She at first averted her eyes, jerking her chin away, but then, pressing her lips together, she met his gaze full-on. She knew he would think her turning away a kind of modesty, a maidenly recoiling from the memory of the night before. She had come upon him in the barn, scraping the hide from the crippled calf he had slaughtered that afternoon; the animal’s malformed legs jutted out at odd angles, wobbling in a kind of ghastly dance with every jerk of the skinning knife against the dangling carcass.

His back and shoulders were bared and she had stood in the shadows watching the cording of the muscles under his skin, damp from sweat and pale as death, as white as lime dust next to the reddish brown of his forearms working to strip away the hide from the twisted flesh of the calf. Sensing her, he turned around, but before he could speak, she had spun away, rushing back to the house, hiding the flush of her neck with her hands. More disquieting than this, though, and the true reason for her turning away, was the knowledge that she had willfully, and shamelessly, plundered Thomas’s great oaken chest.

He followed slowly behind the cart for a short distance, his long legs keeping pace, until they turned onto the north road. He stood there, in the cascading dust from the cart, until it had risen up and over the crest, following the snaking of the Shawshin River.

As they rolled above the water’s course, trumpeting breezes blew the topmost of trees, whipping branches fully green in unpredictable patterns against the untainted blue of the sky. At the quarter mile Martha told riddles to the children: “At night they come without being fetched, by day they are lost without being stolen…. No, not candles, nor yet are they fireflies. Ah, yes, stars!”

And John sang a London street song:

Both the children and the women squealed in delighted protest.

Patience had been good as her word, giving Martha two of her piglets for trade, and Martha regarded them, their snouts straining wetly through the wicker cage, thinking they would bring enough for a new winter cape and a mirrored candle holder. She had spent most evenings stealing a few moments to write in the red book before bed. It had begun with entries of so much wheat kept in the cellar, so much corn, so many seeds, all matters of the Taylor house. But more and more of her musings had turned to Thomas, recording not only the things he said to her, which were more often like the riddles she had told the children, but how he looked at her, much like a starving man looking at a pasty, as though he would devour it whole. Or, she mused, like a man on campaign, long used to depriving himself, warily wakening to the knowledge of his own hunger.

Within the half hour, they had entered the town green, the meetinghouse of Billerica situated on the northern end, its gray boards neatly patchworked with darker, newer planes of wood. The cemetery, already spilling from the front of the yard, spread like a stone curtain, first to its western edge and then to the back of the meetinghouse. To the eastern side sat the Reverend Hastings’s home, the minister she had turned away from Daniel’s table with her combative words. The house was small but with a wooden fence fortifying a generous house garden. A girl, perhaps seventeen, gracefully tended the garden, and Martha’s mouth twisted with the half-resentful thought that, though she was no doubt aptly servile as the minister’s likely wife, she was also quite young and lovely.

There were a dozen women on the green sitting close together, some with their willow-shoot baskets of early sprouts from their gardens, others with brooms or herbals. Apart from them sat or stood the men, coopers and potters, mostly idle as the harvest of summer grain had not yet begun but talking as noisily as the women. As John pulled the wagon up close, all talking ceased. The clump of villagers seemed to Martha like a hive of stinging insects, each contending for the highest position in the honeycomb, each with a stinger for a tongue. But unlike bees, which could sting only once and then died, these goodmen and goodwives could inflict the poison from their tongues again and again, like wasps. The buzzing ceased only so long as it took to scrutinize the new arrivals, and then the hissing was taken up again, no doubt, Martha thought, to the detriment of every visitor’s moral constitution.

Helping Patience from the wagon, Martha situated her cousin among the townswomen and went directly to the weaver, a stout man with bowl-cut hair. She was soon disappointed, though, to see only a few coarse blankets from the weaver’s own loom laid out on the ground. When she told him she was looking for the goods to make a new cloak, he smiled and beckoned her to his wagon, where he removed from a sack a bolt of English wool. She brushed at the covering of dust lying like a second skin over the surface and saw that the cloth had an almost glistening sheen, the color of slate after a heavy rain, and when she tested the weave with her fingers, she knew she must have it. But he would not take only one piglet for the woolen, and she would not readily give up both, as she had in mind to acquire a new lantern as well. Martha held up two fingers covered with grime to show the man she knew the cloth had long been in the wagon, too dear for any local villager to acquire it; and so it had rested there, perhaps for many months beyond the sea passage from England.

“But look here,” he said, “I have waited near eight months, eight months, for this cloth.” The weaver frowned, shaking his head. “Look at the weave. Feel the weight. Why, the shade of it is a mirror to your own eyes. Look here, missus, do not ask me to come so far down.”

“No,” she said, pinning him with her eyes, responding no to every one of his entreaties and proclamations of sacrifice in giving her back coin as overage on the second pig. Martha had seen enough of her father at bargaining to know when to stand and when to walk away. She shook her head and, giving the cloth over to the weaver, turned around. After twenty paces the weaver called out, “Very well, missus, I will give you back your sixpence, but it should be you and not I who tells my good wife of her newfound penury.”

Smiling, Martha accepted the cloth and the coins and pointed the weaver to the wagon to collect his pigs. When she asked him to direct her to the tinsmith, she was dismayed to see him gesture in the direction of a small outbuilding next to the reverend’s plot. The young woman in the garden had finished her work and had gone back inside, and Martha quickly walked to the small shed, hoping the minister would be in the meetinghouse and not at home. She knocked softly on the closed door and waited for the clopping of heavy footsteps of the tinsmith coming to let her in.

She heard the sound of jeering laughter coming from the far side of the green, and when she turned to look, she saw a small knot of children, and a few older girls, taunting something obscured by their swaying bodies. She shook her head, thinking how often a gathering of idle children meant the misfortune of some other child, or animal, smaller than themselves. A girl shrieked in gleeful malice and Martha’s face turned grim, remembering that children can often be sweetest before they turn bad.

The group parted, scattering into differing tribes of girls and boys apart, and she saw what they had been tormenting. A woman, bolted fast in the stocks, her head pointing towards her toes, cried loudly and bitterly to be freed. She called for water, and for pity, but the children had moved on with their games and no one else on the green gave her any notice beyond a nod of annoyance. Martha turned back to the door, and with her hand poised to rap again, it swung widely open, revealing a slight man in well-worn but clean linen and vest, and with the milky eyes of the blind. His chin pointed beyond her shoulder but his head cocked as though following the sounds of her breathing. “Good day,” he said formally. There was a slight pause, and he added, “May I hear your voice? To place you, you understand.”

“I’m here for a lantern,” she answered, casting one last look at the woman in the stocks.

“Ah, yes, of course,” he said and stepped aside, allowing her to enter.

The room inside was as shaded as a cavern, and she realized, as she moved hesitantly over the threshold, that he must work in darkness, as there were no discernible windows set into the walls, the only light coming from the fire pot close to the bench, faintly glowing with copper soldering fragments. He promptly closed the door and she stood in the blackness in uncertain silence. He walked confidently to his workbench and bent over the fire pot, lighting a short taper which he fit into a reflecting lantern.

The startling light revealed a workroom, well swept and orderly, with lanterns of differing sizes pegged to the walls. Baskets fronted the walls, some with cups and long-tined forks, some with smaller workpieces not easily identifiable. The bench was filled with tools, in exacting rows, from the most brutish-size pliers down to smallest, hair’s-width dowels and punches. The smith stood at the desk, fingering the tools gently, as if to assure himself of their placement. She stared at his hands, fascinated by their restless creeping, as though the fingers, long as alder whips, had been fashioned with too many articulating joints.

“I do not know your voice.” He had waited to speak, talking only when she had drawn in a breath to inquire about the lantern.

“I am Martha Allen,” she said, beginning to feel the acrid burn of the soldering pot behind her tongue. The smith raised his brows expectantly but said nothing.

“I would like a lantern. For evenings.” She had added the last foolishly, as if he would not know a lamp would be useless in daylight.

There was a slight pursing of the lips, and the man’s eyelids fell more heavily towards closing, making him appear at once disappointed and yet self-satisfied. “For evening reading, perhaps? Or for the keeping of personal writings?”

At his insinuating tone, she stiffened, remembering the red book sewn into her pillow casing.

He moved assuredly to the wall with the lanterns and asked, “Which one would you choose?”

“I would have something that gives greater light than a candle might. For the writing of accounts, you see. A reflecting lantern, like the one on your bench.”

He clasped his hands together, the long fingers dangling loosely at his groin. “Ah, the pity is I have only one, which, as you can see, is mine own.” He placed the slightest pause before the word “see,” tilting his head to the opposing side, and waited.

“That is a pity,” she said after a moment’s hesitation. “Well, then. I thank you…. My cousin Goodwife Taylor waits for me…”

She turned to leave but he surprised her by saying, “If you wish, I could sell you mine.” He returned to his bench, his hands encircling the base of the lantern.

“I have only sixpence to pay for it,” she began. The large, mirrored lantern on the tinsmith’s table, she knew, was dearer by far than the coins she held in her apron.

“Well, the lantern is old. Stay but a moment and I’ll grease the hinges and polish the mirrors. Come sit while you wait.” He motioned to a stool next to the bench, his manner suddenly solicitous, his smile seemingly ingenuous.

His warmth disarmed her, and despite being disquieted over his initial aloofness, Martha walked to the stool and, balancing the woolen cloth over her lap, sat down.

“I did not realize you were family to the Taylors,” he said. He took out the candle that had been burning inside the reflecting lantern and placed it in a simple brass holder close by. He began to dismantle the lantern, laying the pieces carefully on the workbench. The lack of reflected light from the single, guttering candle diminished the scope of the room, crowding the corners into shadow again. “You are, I think, daughter to Goodman Allen of Andover.”

“You know of my family?” she asked.

The tinsmith pointed his face towards her, one corner of his mouth curling into a half smile. “I am blind, missus, not deaf. There is very little that escapes my attention. Mind you, I have never traded with your father, but I have heard enough to know the measure of Goodman Allen.” There was the faintest hint of mockery in his voice, but he had turned away to breathe moist air onto one of the mirrored panels. He rubbed it vigorously for a time with a cloth before asking, “How is it, your time spent with the Taylors?”

“It is all well enough. They are good to me.” The smoke from the fire pot had suddenly made her sleepy and she stifled a yawn.

“You do not find Goodwife Taylor a bit… a bit… how shall I say…” He paused and pointed his eyes towards the ceiling as though deep in thought. “Parsimonious?” He beamed at her broadly and she smiled in return, ducking her chin with the urge to laugh out loud.

With exaggerated seriousness he said, “I should not say such to you, as she is, above all, your cousin.” He smiled overly long at her, the opaque surface of his eyes unblinking, and, unnerved, she glanced away.

“The Taylor household is well turned-out, so I have heard,” he said, returning his attention to his work. “There are two landsmen on the settlement, are there not? One a Scotsman, the other a Welshman.” He paused a moment before adding, softly, distinctly, “Morgan by name.”

Martha looked up, surprised. “No. His name is Carrier. Thomas Carrier.”

“Carrier? Then perhaps I am mistaken. Though…” His voice trailed off and he shook his head once.

“Though…?” she echoed.

He leaned over the bench towards her, dropping his weight onto resting elbows, his face close to hers. “It’s been said that the Welshman got on the boat with one name and stepped off the boat with another. It’s common enough. Many of the first families have done it. Just after the Great War, when they had need of safe haven in the colonies.”

“Safe haven,” she said, her voice turning sharp and wary. “From what?”

The tinsmith’s lids came down, half-mast, over the pale, marbled surface of his eyes, his lips pursing suggestively. “The king’s justice, of course. He hunts, even now, for his father’s killers. All have been pardoned. All but those whose hands signed the death warrant, and those whose hands wielded the implement of death.” His fingers brushed over the tools, coming to rest on a small, needle-like screw turn. With a few exacting twists, the trap hinges on the lantern fell free with a clatter, making her jump. “Surely you know that Cromwell’s confederates yet live here, hiding in plain sight?”

His mouth twisted for a moment bitterly. “If I may use such a common phrase. There has been offered a generous bounty for the capture of these accused men. As you are not native to this town, you may not know that Thomas Carrier has long been suspected of being Thomas Morgan, the man who, for love of Cromwell’s cause, swung the ax, taking the life of an anointed king. It is said that after the blade came down, he held up the royal gourd for all to see.”

He waited for her to speak, and when she didn’t respond, he extended one arm over his head to demonstrate, adding, “He was chosen because he was so tall, you understand, so that when he reached out his hand, holding the still-dripping head, even those pressed to the very front of the platform could gaze upon it.” He dropped his arm and shrugged. “But this is only rumor. Perhaps, as you are a woman, I should speak no more on this…” One side of his mouth curled up, his voice trailing into silence.

A sudden recollection of the flat wooden piece in Thomas’s oak trunk was followed with the vision she had had of his shirt, stained and running with blood, and she felt a panic building in her head like mercury rising. She sensed the tinsmith listening to her quickened breaths, perhaps waiting for her to press him into revealing more about the regicides, questioning him about rumors that must have wafted through the workroom like smoke from the fire pot.

From her childhood she had heard stories, told as frequently as the coming of tides, from her father, and his cronies, that Cromwell’s cousin and son-in-law had long been hidden and fed by local Massachusetts farmers. The glories of the civil war, and Cromwell’s decadelong reign between the executed Charles the father and the restored Charles the son, were often burnished and constructed anew at night in secret when the fire was banked and the doors locked. It was a source of deep-seated pride to the New Englanders that not one man, woman, or child had taken the king’s bounty in arresting Edward Whalley and William Goffe, Cromwell’s kin and fellow regicides, and others besides, who had fought against the first Charles. The colonists were a thorny, resourceful, and resistant lot when it came to betraying one of their own to the Royalists, and they held a perverse pride that common men, for the sake of common rights, had had the temerity, and nerve, to pull down a king.

“Gossip is like a poisoned soup,” she said, the tension in her voice making her sound waspish and scolding. “Delicious at first but deadly over time.”

He had started reassembling the pieces of the lantern, but he put the tools aside and said, “Well, then, we will not drink of the poisoned cup. We will speak only of cordial things. To my mind, it is a winning trait when a woman does not sup on gossip. It means she can keep an intimate confidence.” He leaned forward on his elbows, his nostrils widening, breathing in some scent that inhabited the place where she sat. “You have a deep voice for a woman, but for all that, it is pleasing. You are not yet married, I believe.” She dropped her gaze away from his sightless stare, drawn again to the play of his fingers, searching the air like the eye stalks of an insect.

Repressing the longing to jerk the stool farther away from the bench, she gathered the cloth closer to her chest and said, “I must leave now.”

His tongue flicked absently at the corner of his mouth. “But I am not yet finished.”

“Then I will come back another day.” She rose, scraping the stool against the floorboards, and walked swiftly towards the door. Before she could grasp the latch, the tinsmith blew out the candle. She stood for a moment in complete darkness, trying to calm her unreasoning fear that he would come upon her from behind. She groped to find the handle, taking first one step and then another, until she touched what she hoped was the door. She ran her hands searchingly over the wood, feeling for the latch, and when she found it, she tugged hard. The door would not open and she realized he had bolted the lock when she first entered.

She slipped her hands up along the frame, frantically searching for the lock, listening for the sounds of approaching footsteps but hearing nothing. When her fingers touched metal, she slipped the bolt and fiercely tugged open the door.

As she rushed over the threshold, he called to her sharply, “Missus.” Reflexively, she paused, and he said, calmly and clearly from his place at the bench, “Ask him about the Prudent Mary.”

Leaving the door ajar, she hurried past the rectory and, looking up once, saw the minister’s face at the window, starkly assessing her panicked flight towards the green. She willfully slowed her pace, matching her breathing to the reflective chanting of the unfamiliar name given to her by the tinsmith: “Prudent Mary, Prudent Mary.” John beckoned to her from the wagon, and Martha could see Patience and the children waiting restlessly for her to join them.

She was flushed and shaken, but Patience was too satisfied with her afternoon of trading and preoccupied with a crying Joanna to take note. As John pulled away from the green, Will slipped his hands, tightly closed into two fists, onto her lap and asked, “Butter or cream?” He tapped at her legs until she faced him, and he asked again, “Butter or cream?” It was a guessing game they often played where a treat was hidden in one of the asker’s hands; left was “butter,” right was “cream.” If the guesser picked the correct hand, the asker must give over the treat. Martha studied the boy’s dirty face, stricken with childish concern for her inexplicable distress, and she smiled, tugging roughly at his hair with her fingers.

“Butter,” she said, tapping his left hand. He grinned with relief and opened an empty palm to her. “Go on,” she prompted, and he quickly shoved into his mouth the bit of damp sugar that had been clenched in his right hand.

As they rolled past the now-silent figure in the stocks, the woman craned her neck to the side and stared up at Martha with accusing eyes. Rage had replaced the shame of being pilloried, and her piercing look came like a mother’s slap, and a mother’s warning. The woman’s eyes, the palest of blue and clouded with the beginnings of elder blindness, craned and looked at the wagon until it had pulled out beyond the town marker.

THE MOWING OF the common fields began upon the cresting of the sun. The entire town of Billerica had come out to harvest the green and fibrous grasses, sawing at the wind in nodding waves. Each settlement would share in its deserved portion, the largest homesteads getting the largest share of fodder for their farm stock. Well before dawn, men and women on foot and in carts, carrying scythes and rakes and pitchforks, had joined the road winding north beyond Loes Plain. They came together in banded groups, families by blood or marriage, or in camps of common-minded neighbors, eager to give or receive news and gossip of the recent births and deaths in a neighboring village, or the vagaries of trade in a marketplace that lived or died much as the people did. They spoke in quiet undertones, calling to one another in hoarse whispers, as though the sun were a living thing that could be frightened away by the sudden remonstrations and shouts of people.

Martha had chosen to walk the few miles rather than ride in the wagon with Patience and the children, her pace joyfully rapid, keeping time with Thomas’s loping stride. The air was cool on her ankles, bare from lack of stockings, and she could have walked barefoot if not for the presence of men. Will got down and ran for a time back and forth between them, teasing and chanting, “Catch me, catch me, catch me,” until Thomas grabbed him up and tossed him shrieking over one shoulder. He was carried aloft for a while, dizzy and excited to be able to see ahead to the main group of villagers moving inexorably forward. Well beyond Fox Brook on a hillock, Thomas tossed Will back into the wagon and let it roll ahead, motioning for Martha to stand for a moment alone with him. As the wagon descended the far side of the hill, Patience turned her head around to watch them thoughtfully, her eyes guarded and questioning.

Thomas pointed west to a crooked bend at the Concord River where a deep pool formed, bowered over thickly with cattails and river fronds. He said to her, “In a year’s time, that’s to be our land. Mine and John’s.”

Her throat tightened at the beauty, the possibilities, of such a place, and a desire as strong as despair twisted in her chest. The rising sun flared off an eddy on the river, and she turned to watch Thomas, the flat planes of her face catching the biased light. She had never seen a man at rest who could stand so resolutely still; the absence of movement fooled the eye into believing the tall, angular Welshman at his ease was somehow less threatening than he truly was.

He had an economy and a surety of movement to everything he accomplished, never giving more energy to a task than was required, allowing the impetus of a tool’s own forward momentum and the pull of gravity to move rock and earth. And yet, at the behest of a neighbor who had no gun for butchering, she had seen Thomas fell an ox with a hammer so forcefully that the brains of the beast had been found in its throat. For all his native strength, though, he had yet to be proclaimed best man at the reaping.

Every man in Billerica with hair on his face worked a scythe to harvest the feed grass, hoping to be the last villager standing in the newly cleared field. Most times, completed within the span of a day and half a night, the scything would have a tinge of desperate zeal to it, a kind of battle. The men would attack the grass, mowing it in ever-expanding patterns, never stopping, except for a brief swallow of water or pocket bread, until exhaustion overtook them. One by one they would drop out until one man remained alone, a corn king, a prince of reeds, upright on the ground littered with broken stalks. Made much over by women and men alike, he would be fed the best meat, given the best ale, deferred to, listened to, sought after. For three years running a townsman named Ezra Black had been proclaimed the winner. Looking at Thomas in the strengthening light, she instinctively knew that he never took the honors as he had nothing to prove to these farmers of Billerica. He simply worked to fulfill his needed allotment of grass, leaving the contest to those yeomen whose reputations, and pride, depended upon such a small and circumscribed ritual.

Within the half hour they had joined the encampment of townspeople at the edge of the field, and upon the completion of the blessing by the Reverend Hastings, the men commenced the reaping. Moving in a northwesterly direction, their long-handled blades swinging in wide arcs, they opened up swaths between the long grasses. The stalks, still wet and clinging from the morning dew, lay crossed together in disordered patterns, turning hour by hour from dark green to yellowish brown. The women and children, some as young as Joanna, followed behind the men spreading and turning the grasses with rakes, gathering them into windrows to dry under the sun. Forty-odd men worked the fields, and they had cleared almost five acres when the drum rolled, calling them to pause for the noon meal of meat and bread and cold water drawn from the river.

Earlier, Patience had pushed a sharp elbow into Martha’s side, pointing out Ezra Black with her chin, remarking, “He is not yet married, cousin, and must marry soon or be thought a scandal.” She raised her eyebrows significantly, and Martha turned away before she betrayed her impatience. There had been a lustful buzzing around Ezra from the outset as first one young woman and then another found reason to drift close to him, to bring him water or to pull her cap aside to show off a small but immoderately straying curl. He was powerfully built with immense arms, thighs, and calves, but with bandy legs and a head full of dark ringlets that looked suspiciously oiled. Martha could have guessed without being shown who the cock of the hour was.

Patience pressed into Martha’s hands a large joint of meat and gave her a push in Ezra’s direction. As she approached him, he grinned widely, his squinting eyes disappearing behind the high mounds of his cheeks.

“You are Martha. Your cousin has told me of you,” he said, wiping at the sweat on his face. He crossed his arms and looked her over like a mare. “She told me you have been saving something for me.” He grinned even wider and winked his eye at her.

She blinked twice and felt the small of her back go rigid. At the setting of her face, there was a slight faltering of confidence in Ezra’s eyes, but he pointed to the joint of meat and winked again. Martha could sense the men and women watching them, waiting for an exchange of words. She handed him the meat, wiping her hands on her apron, and glanced at Thomas, who was drinking from a dipper of water, his eyes thoughtfully on Ezra.

“Well, there is no need for excitation. After all,” she said, looking down at the crease in his pants, “it is such a small joint.”

Ezra threw his head back and bellowed, gazing at her with nodding approval. “It’s not so small as you might think. Why,” he said, rubbing at the side of his nose, “there is plenty enough to feed the both of us.”

Despite her best efforts, she smiled, stifling a laugh, and after gnawing a bit of meat off the bone, he moved in closer. “You hold the rest for me for a short while. I trust it will be warmed in your lap and then I’ll claim it again. As best man.” He grinned at her and picked up his scythe as the drum rolled again, moving away with the tide of men returning to work.

The breezes which had cooled the fields that morning grew slack and then stopped blowing altogether, the sun shining uncensored in a cloudless sky, sparking off the newly sharpened edges of the working scythes. It wasn’t until the light had begun to shift beyond the forests of Chelmsford to the west that the older men, distressed by the heat, began to waver, stumble, and then quit the field, helped along by their women to places in the shade. The spent men rested, boasting of their performance in years past and guardedly laying odds on the last man standing. The women and children labored on, raking and gathering, until close to ten acres had been cocked and loaded into carts and wagons to be taken home, the farmers looking with a sharp eye to every other man’s apportioned share.

At sunset, the lowering rays painted the stalks to a golden red and soon John returned breathless and exhausted, dragging his scythe like a ruined toy behind him. His face was pinched with the heat and he wiped at his neck with a sleeve, saying, “I’m finished… cooked to a goose.” Propping himself sitting against the wagon, he doused his head and neck with the water skin, drinking deeply. Martha came to stand next to him, shielding her eyes with her hands, anxiously scanning the fields. She asked, “Is Thomas yet reaping?” When there was no answer she looked down to see John studying her, one eye squeezed shut against the sweat still pouring down his forehead.

He took another long drink and answered, smiling, “Ezra Black is a dead man.”

Two hours past sunset, there were only five men left in the field, and the villagers sent their yawning, limp children into the blackening shadows to take water to the reapers and to bring back word of who thrived and who faltered. Soon nothing could be seen beyond the cook fires, but the voices of the still-working men could be heard calling back and forth, encouraging, taunting, challenging one another to stay or give up and return to the warmth of a fire and a well-deserved rest. Within an hour’s time the calling ceased and there was no sound from the field but a distant whooshing noise of the evening breezes sweeping and bending the remaining shafts.

Martha sat feeding the fire with dried grasses and watching the children, delighted with the little leather-winged bats that flew above the flames, chasing the sparks as though they were fireflies. Patience, resting hunkered on the ground, had begun nodding drowsily into sleep when a man approached the circle of firelight asking for Goodwife Taylor. He had the ruddy face and breadth of shoulders of a farmer, but his shirt was of a better quality than those worn by the other village men, and though it had been soaked with sweat, it looked decently clean. Patience roused herself and, gesturing for Martha to help her up, rose awkwardly to face him. Straightening her apron down over her swollen belly, she said, “I am Goodwife Taylor.”

“Goody Taylor, my name is Asa Rogers, recently come from Salem with my brother. I’ve heard from some here in Billerica that you’ve land which lies fallow on the river.” He pointed southerly towards the Concord and continued, “I am here to propose a fair price on the land. More than fair, in fact.” When she didn’t answer, he added, “A quite generous offer.”

“Who has put about that the land is unclaimed?” Martha asked, realizing with sudden alarm that he spoke of the plot promised to Thomas.

He cut his eyes briefly at her, and she saw a hard shrewdness far beyond the simple cunning of a farmer at trade. “As it so happens, it was Edward Wright, the tinsmith.” He turned back to Patience, his voice reasonable and reassuring. “Goodwife Taylor, I’ll be building a mill and need land seated on water. Whatever arrangements have been proposed, if there is no binding contract and no coin proffered, the land is yet in your possession, to be disposed of at your will. And to your gain.”

“My husband is not here…,” Patience began uncertainly, flinching as Martha’s grip tightened painfully on her hand.

“That land is promised to another,” Martha said, noting the barely concealed flash of irritation crossing the miller’s face.

He took off his hat, slapping it twice against his thigh. “What if the land was promised in good faith but accepted under false pretenses?”

Patience frowned and opened her mouth to speak when Martha tugged at her hand to remain silent.

“Very well,” he said after a moment’s pause. He nodded to Patience. “I’ll speak to your husband about this when he is returned. I stay with the Reverend Hastings if you have a change of heart. Good night.” He flashed a final hooded look at Martha and walked away.

As the stars pinpricked their way through the sky, there were only two men left in the field. Martha wrapped some bread and meat in her apron and let Will lead her to the place where he had last seen Thomas working. Martha could see from a distance his broad-brimmed straw hat towering above the whispering grasses, reflecting the faint nocturnal light as sharply as a sail under the moon. She wordlessly gave him the food and drink, and when he had finished, she felt his hand slip warmly around her upper arm. He kneaded the flesh, his fingers gripping her tightly. He released her and stepped away to resume his reaping, careful to keep the swinging blade from cutting her or the child. Close by, she could hear the rhythmic swish of Ezra’s scythe, his breathing beginning to sound burdened. Will took her by the hand, and she followed him back to the cook fires blazing close together in defensive clusters.

One by one, as midnight passed, the villagers and their children drifted off to sleep, the fires wasting down to embers. The breeze turned cooler and Martha lay down under a blanket, Patience at her back, the children huddled together for warmth nearby. She closed her eyes but sleep would not come. Like a plague carcass, the tinsmith had thrown at her the unfamiliar and dangerous-sounding names of Thomas Morgan and Prudent Mary, and a hot, new resentment towards the man pricked at her, knowing that he had pointed Asa Rogers to the land on the river promised in good faith to Thomas. “Accepted under false pretenses,” Rogers had said. She twisted under the blanket, restless and anxious over what this might mean, and Patience muttered impatiently for her to lie still. Martha slid a lingering hand up the sleeve of her own dress, mimicking Thomas’s grip on her arm, and for a time allowed herself to imagine the weight of his arms around her waist.

She woke when the sky was lightening, the stars gone, and she sat abruptly and rubbed at her eyes. A small band of men had walked into the field some distance away and stood motionless looking in the same direction. She quickly rose and walked to where they were gathered and saw that another five acres had been mown through the blackest of night, the grass lying cropped and flattened, as though a monstrous mill wheel had been rolled across the ground. Two men reaping could be seen afar in the newly made clearing. One figure had stopped and leaned heavily on his scythe handle, swaying gently as though balanced on a rending ice floe. The other figure continued in a slow and steady pace, hacking through the stalks with a dulled blade, step and sweep, step and sweep, until the smaller man stopped his weaving and crumpled onto the freshly cut hay.

The fallen man was carried from the field, and there was no clapping on the back or welcoming draught of ale for Ezra Black, only the amazed and wary looks from the waking men and women now running into the field to stare at the victor. Their incredulous faces looked to the tall man, relentless and poised, holding his scythe with a firm and steady hand, as if the roaring pendulum of God had come to sever the life strings between Heaven and Earth.

He walked the few miles to home, refusing to be carried in the wagon’s bed on top of the soft and fragrant mown grasses, and Martha walked beside him, slipping her hand into his at the quarter-mile marker.