The Pilgrim (3 page)

Upon the appointed day, at noon, Mary was taken up Gallows Hill in a cart. John Barker, the hangman, was the executioner in Cranborne gaol. My father gave a sermon on Romans 6:23, “For the wages of sin is death.”

When Barker put the noose about Mary's neck, she cried out, “Lord, make this quick!”

My father bade me to go home. As I departed, I watched him and Ben make their way to the foot of the gallows. I could not bring myself to look upon my beloved Mary being hanged. On my way to the parsonage house, I heard the crowd roar on Gallows Hill.

Ben and my father soon returned home. Ben alone came within-door. My father waited in the yard, holding his hat in his hand. I went to him. His hat, the nape of his neck, his shoulders, and his upper back were covered with feces. The stench made me nauseous. I held my nose.

My father put off his reeking clothes, and Ben washed his whole body. Ben burned the stinking hat and clothes, while my father donned his old black suit. We entered the house together, and my father said, “Mary's neck did not break when she was hanged. I could not allow her to slowly strangle, so I pulled on her legs with all my might. I heard her neck bone break. Then her bowels gushed all over me.”

Father's parish was charged six shillings and eight pence for Mary's burial. The parishioners protested spending the money on a blaspheming murderer's burial. My father paid the fee.

He kept his promise and visited Mary's four orphaned daughters in the Hospital, wherein he learned that the eldest, Bess, had angered the bonelace teacher by being negligent in her work. The teacher had her flogged at the whipping post. She was given six stripes with a birch rod. My father fetched Ben to carry her home and summoned the barber-surgeon to tend her wounds. She shared the kitchen maid's bed.

Upon the next morning, I looked in on Bess, and she said, “Stay a little, I pray you, and speak with me.”

We spake for the better part of an hour. Amongst the things she said, were, “Methinks Mama loved you more than me, but I forgive you. Daddy loved me best,” and, “Mama said the Devil hath a shrill voice.” Another was this: “If Mama burns amongst the damned, then let it be the same for me. Let me suffer with her forever. Yet if Daddy be saved and in Heaven, I would abide with him in bliss. I loved him best. Well, I leave it to God. I put my trust in Him.”

The day after, she fell sore sick with a burning fever. Five days afterwards at eventide, she yielded up the ghost.

• • •

In July of the year of Christ 1611, my father made his annual journey to Cambridge for Commencement, wherein he passed a week feasting and reveling, in a riot of meat and wine. Then he passed another week catching fire, as he termed it, from praying, fasting, and meditating with other godly Ministers of like belief who had graduated from the University.

During this time I helped my uncle Roger and his husbandmen make hay upon his farm. He said to me, “Your father has but a week of frolic at Cambridge, but for the rest of the year, he must pray and fast and trudge about the town, this way and that, here to a drab, there to a thief or murderer, like your accursed nurse, that slave of Satan's! What sort of life is that for a man? Live with me and your aunt and work my farm. Hard work in the open air will purge the torments from your soul.” He belched. “And when my good wife and I die, all that I have will be yours, even unto my black breeches, black stockings, and red cloak.”

I considered my uncle's liberal offer. When my father returned from Cambridge, he taught me to keep the accounts he kept of my uncle's farm and shop. The foregoing year, Roger's profit was thirty-seven pounds and six shillings. I exulted in my thoughts of the money that might some day accrue to me if I managed his farm and glover's shop well. So I thus accepted my uncle's offer.

My father was sorrowful that I had relinquished his design for me to go to Cambridge and become a Minister. He said, “Make not Mammon your god!”

“Father,” I said, “your God is my God, and I cry unto Him, ‘Lord, save me!'”

Uncle Roger hired an attorney to write his will. I was to inherit his farm, glover's shop, and sundry other things, inclusive of his stockings, breeches, and cloak, upon his and his wife's death, the stipulation being that I was to be a servant in husbandry who would be paid two pounds and eight shillings per annum, together with lodging, meat and drink, and livery for as long as my uncle and aunt lived. The Devil bade me wonder how long that would be.

My aunt Eliza wanted her nephew Tom Foot to inherit the farm. She said to me, “Thou art not a husbandman. You are a scholar. Tom was born to work the land.”

Said I, “God and uncle Roger have determined otherwise.”

Even though my father was compelled by Ecclesiastical law to read the recent translation into the common language of the Bible in church, he had given me a volume of the old wholesome Geneva translation of Holy Scripture and bade me to read a chapter therein every evening for so long as I remained upon the farm, lest I forget my Creator in the days of my youth. I did so.

One evening, I read in Exodus 39:2, “So he made the ephod of gold, blue silk, and purple and scarlet, and fine twined linen.” Now I knew from my father that an ephod was an antique priestly garment without sleeves. The English sentence was not only music to my ears, but it conveyed divers, brightly colored images to my mind's eye. The English language bewitched me, and I fell in love with my mother tongue.

• • •

On the twelfth of September in the year of Christ 1611, I began living and labouring upon my uncle Roger's farm. I was a student again—but this time, of husbandry and the divers and sundry things which compose the natural world that my father deemed to be ciphers writ by God.

My first task was to help with the harvest. I have a memory that is surely from the latter part of the month: it is a chilly afternoon. The wind knocks the apples together on the trees, and I gather the fallen fruit to fill my uncle Roger's pies. He enjoyed baking apple pies; they were very delicious in taste. He did everything well.

That selfsame autumn, when some of the threshing was done, uncle Roger taught me how to sow his fields with rye and then wheat. I learned to make cider, prune his apple, pear, and cherry trees, and trim his hedges. He taught me to spit on my hands to prevent them from forming blisters.

Tom Foot, the hired husbandman, was a robust youth of my own age. I was weak-limbed and quickly wearied from the vigorous labour. My arms and back ached. But by November, when the autumn planting was finished, my hands were callused and my muscles had grown hard. I learned to slaughter swine and bullocks, the latter with a poleaxe that, at first, took me three or four blows between their big eyes. Covered with blood, bits of bone, and brains, I fully apprehended that we live fallen in a fallen world, wherein life and death feed upon each other.

Thus, I learned much on the farm, but not to ride a horse. I was scared of being bitten by one. My uncle Roger kept two geldings and a mare. They knew that I was frightened of them and tried to bite me. I always walked the three miles into town. I am glad that there are no horses in New England.

Along with an unmarried shepherd by the name of Peter Patch, my uncle kept two unmarried women servants and two other unmarried male servants in husbandry. They were twins named Jacob and Richard Fletcher. Uncle Roger called them “Jacob” and “Esau” because the latter was much hairier than his brother; the hairs grew thickly upon his broad back, chest, and arms.

Now this Esau, like the Esau in Scripture, was a knave; he refused to accompany the rest of us to St. James on the Lord's Day but slept until dinner. He was a diligent labourer and so my uncle was loathe to report him to the constable, as Esau could not have paid the two-shilling fine. My niggardly uncle would not spend the cash himself; Esau would have been put in the stocks, and my uncle would have lost the former's day's work, or more.

Then Providence willed that during the second year I was at the farm, Esau was much bruised by the fall of a dead elm tree in a high wind and forced to spend almost a week abed. At length, my uncle said to him, “Up with you and return to your labours! For those who indulge themselves in idleness, the express command of God unto us is that we should let them starve.”

My uncle commanded Esau to go to church, saying, “God hath warned you not to slink from Him! The next time, you absent yourself from church upon the Sabbath, you will surely die!” Thereafter, Esau Fletcher kept the Sabbath as well as any Christian soul in St. James parish. At Sunday breakfast, my aunt Eliza gave us servants thinner slices of the white loaf, flavoured with nutmeg, and but one mug each of hot boiled milk. For supper, she oft served herself alone a special diet of cow-calf or wether mutton.

The following July, she brake a tooth upon a cherry stone, and, God forgive me, I had the satisfaction of reciting to myself from Psalm 3:7, “O Lord, arise; help me, my God: for thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheek bone: thou hast broken the teeth of the wicked.” The broken tooth greatly pained her until she had it extracted.

• • •

Also on the twelfth of September in the year of Christ 1611, which fell upon a Thursday—I made a note of it—on that evening, after supper, upon which I began reading from the Bible, my uncle Roger asked me to also read aloud to him. And thus it became our custom, evening after evening, for three years, three months, and four-and-twenty days. Sometimes, it is true, my uncle fell asleep, particularly during the harvest, sheep shearing, or other long days of hard labour. And sometimes, being otherwise occupied, he missed the occasion. But more oft than not, he harkened to the sacred text.

He confessed that the meaning of the verses oft perplexed him—as they did me—but that—like me—he was bewitched by their melodious sound. He was charmed by similes, metaphors, and imagery, though he was unacquainted with those poetical terms until I taught them to him.

He committed to memory vivid utterances in common speech that he had heard over the years in the market-place, in the streets, in the taverns, at fairs, &c. I wrote these down: “A press of people standing as close as mutton pies in an oven.” “From the sprig of his cap to his spangled shoe strap.” “Laughing like a ploughman at a Morris dance.” And then there was the verse of a song my uncle had learned at the Woodbury Fair held near Bere Regis about the eighteenth of every September:

The plough is the Lord's pen.

It writes the land to sow our seed

To feed the poor that stand in need.

Neither the Prince nor peasants read

Without this pen, or earn their bread.

It bringeth increase to the most and least

Such food as serveth man and beast.

My uncle Roger said, “I'm a fool for words.” When next I looked upon a plough, I thought, “Thou art God's pen.”

Uncle Roger reciprocated for my reading Scripture to him by teaching me to load, prime, aim, discharge, and cleanse his musket. I learned to make char cloth from linen strips that ignited by striking sparks from a flint and steel upon the strip, and from the little fire, lighting the tip of the match cord, blowing on its coal to keep it smouldering, and using that to ignite the fine powder in the musket's pan. The match cord, I discovered, was soaked in saltpeter, yet difficult to keep glowing in a high wind, rain, or snow. Roger also taught me how to mold bullets and goose-shot, with which we went hunting and fowling upon the Downs. He was a good marksman; I was not. As such, it was only by an intervention of Providence that my shot shattered the left elbow of the savage Massachusetts Indian in Wessagusset during the spring of 1623.

• • •

The Devil engendered my encounters with Jane Fuller. The daughter of Matthew Fuller, a miller in Winterbourne, she was a maid at The Sign of the Bull in the High East Street, whence I delivered some of my uncle's cider in the spring of my sixteenth year. She was a year older than I and jested with me about my being shy.

I said, “Fetch me a cup of ale.”

She pulled at my sleeve and said, “You need not fear me.”

I said, “I fear you not.”

“Then come,” she said. “Come, drink a pot with me.” But I hastened through the door and onto the High East Street.

I returned to The Sign of the Bull upon the following market day. Jane reiterated her previous request, and we drank a pot together. She and her father were parishioners of All Saints in the High Street. She fulminated against their rector, Mr. Lane, who had made a goodly profit selling corn to the Mayor for the poor and had become so proud he no longer spake to common folk in his congregation, like Jane and her father.

I tried to persuade Jane to come to services at St. James, but she said, “I will stay with Mr. Lane. Does not Scripture say that pride goeth before a fall? Is that not Scripture? I want to be there when Mr. Lane stumbles and falls upon his bum. God is just; it will happen one day in church. Perhaps on his way to the pulpit. You wait and see!”

I went to see Jane Fuller at The Sign of the Bull every market day for a month. We drank country brew. One afternoon, she wound the string of my shirt about her forefinger and entreated me to go a-maying with her. I refused to take part in a pagan ritual. But at dawn on May Day, I succumbed to temptation and walked into town. I saw Jane return with other maidens and lads from Conant's wood, wherein they had sipped a drop or two of dew from the tips of their fingers.

I confess that I joined them gathering green branches, Wind Flowers, violets, Early Purples, thyme, and Kingcups. Then we all went singing from door to door. I did not sing those pagan songs. But I listened to the music of the pipes and drums in the streets and watched the heathen Maypole, a goodly pine tree, bare of branches, and some fifty foot in length, covered all over with flowers and herbs, being borne to the market square by two yoke of oxen. Each one had a sweet nosegay of flowers tied on the tip of his horns. On the village green by the Maypole, Jane put off her shoes and bared her breasts to me; I fled back to the farm.