The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin (13 page)

She might have kept her dark acts hidden had not her master and mistress left for England, causing Mary to remove to
another house into the service of a woman, a midwife, who had suspected her condition previously. Upon examining the young woman, her new mistress found her to have been delivered with trial, which the young woman then admitted, saying however that the child had been still-born and that she had placed the tiny corpse in the fire. But a search being made of her former house, the child's corpse was found in a chest where she had hidden it. During the trial, the jury caused her to touch the face of the corpse, and the blood came newly into it. Hence she admitted all the truth, including the further prostitution of her body with another man since coming to Boston. She was shamed and penitent, but they condemned her to death.

She complained of her heart's hardness even at her death. Likewise she prayed for pardon, then for Christ's mercy, until she was finally turned off. But hanging some time, she met not death, and she asked what they meant to do. Whereupon two men stepped up, one turning the knot of the rope backward, and she quickly died.

There is much that men and women do outside the laws and strictures of the magistrates and the teachers. I mean not only black arts but fornication, passing a babe before its time, and the curses and assaults that crowd the courts. But to kill one's own newborn with one's own hand? To bash out its brains or deny it care for months and turn like a stone against its agonies? Some have pleaded they would prevent their coming into public shame. And though that may be sufficient motivation for a few, must not there be also greater desperation for many others in this departure from all natural sentiment? Must not there be some wrenching of mind from heart to turn the bowels to such darkness? What must be our circumstances and afflictions to act thus? “Who can understand his errors? Cleanse thou me from secret faults.”

Worse, who among us might not be sufficiently scourged to allow such evil to come into her that she become the instrument
of affliction against the innocent of the world? Are we not all of the same nature and kept from like evils not by our own hearts, but through the pleasure of that Greater Power alone? “Also in thy skirts is found the blood of the souls of the poor innocents: I have not found it by secret search, but upon all these.”

The frightful story has caused me anguish. We are tempted and fall, abandoned, moving toward life or death, passing our time upon the earth in strange joys and travails, amidst awful signs.

“Thou hast set our iniquities before thee: our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.

“Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us: and the years wherein we have seen evil.”

March 12, 1647

H. makes final preparations to go up into the country. He speaks of a fortnight or three weeks. That is as he arranged with Mr. C. But I doubt he will return before April is out, perhaps even May. I, Martha, and Cook are prepared to manage. It is only strange to me how I fear I shall miss his quiet company as much as his help.

May 13, 1647

“Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem . . . and seek in the broad places thereof, if ye can find a man, if there be
any
that executeth judgment, that seeketh the truth; and I will pardon it.”

This spring I saw again the inconstancy of a man. And am I stricken, humbled by my own failure to free myself of corruption and withstand God's trying of me?

It was mid-morning. I had been searching for Patience in the wood near my house where she likes to forage. She never ventures far nor stumbles into trouble there, being an old homebody herself and always returning punctually. But this winter, and deep into spring, there had been many wolves about, so I was apprehensive for her on that account even this late into the season.

The men had organized hunting parties with dogs and set a good reward on wolfskins. But the creatures are so prolific that their constant menace to domestic animals was hardly reduced until their worst season abated with the fish spawnings. As Mr. Surrey remarked, there is so much wolf dung about that we need not hear from colicky babes for years to come. In the bleakest time of winter, I had seen them by the house at odd hours. They arrive in divers colors—shades of sand, black, grizzled, white. Some are quite huge. These marauders have been quiet of late, but, Higgins being still away so far as I knew, about mid-morning—the first moment I had been free to look for her since missing her at milking hour—I took an axe along and stepped into the woods, calling to Patience.

The woods were cool and resinous, with hints of blossoms hidden in the sunny corners. I followed the old trail in the wood which, I knew, she often used, and which was gradually leading me around toward the river. I had nearly broken out onto its grassy margin when I heard laughter. Stopping, I determined it to be the laughter of a man and a woman. I ceased calling and moved quietly forward until the trees began to thin into the marshlands. Then I stopped again and, standing behind the thick stem of an old oak, saw the river itself and the hunter's wigwam upon an elevated stretch of bank. I now recognized my exact position upon the river. The laughter had ceased momentarily, so I stayed still, merely watching the dome of bark and matts in the sunlight. It being warm early in the season, only waterbirds and marsh blackbirds moved about in the open,
yet behind me the woods were full of the movement and sound of birds.

Suddenly a man and woman, naked, ran from the wigwam to the very edge of the riverbank. I could not tell at my distance who the people were, only that the woman had flowers wreathed in her hair. By their white bodies, their voices and laughter I knew that they were English. Had it been a month later, I might have walked in the marsh hay toward them completely hidden, but at this season the grass was still low.

As I watched the couple I became consumed more by curiosity than common sense. Bending as low as I could, I hurried toward a thicket by a closer tree in one patch of the descending marsh field. Their faces had been turned away from me, and they were too preoccupied with their bodies to notice a foolish woman bettering her position to spy upon them.

Had they been caught and exposed in their pleasures, punishment would have been grievous indeed, but I had no desire to reveal the dark secrets between them. Had I known what I was about to see, I would have known even more certainly the impossibility of ever relating openly what I witnessed.

Then it was that I recognized them, as their faces kept turning toward me while they danced in circles holding one another's hands. The woman was the widow Gage, one of faultless reputation and carriage, whose husband had died in the river during a log drive the previous summer. The man, whose form I had grown almost certain I recognized, I now saw to be Jared Higgins. I was far more stricken by their identities than by coming upon them in such circumstances in the first place. I was too embarrassed to make my presence known and too afraid of being discovered to move away even as I had come. I must, moreover, confess to the strange fascination of observing these two, glorying their flesh in the sunlight, the flowers flapping in her loose hair, a girdle of herbs and leaves bouncing
against her waist, her hand at intervals playfully caressing or plucking his taut instrument like the string of a lute.

It would be impossible for me to write, even here, all that I witnessed between them. For their practices grew more beastly, turning their bodies into a Boggards. Had ever such a lewd and wanton woman hidden behind so chaste and godly an exterior? Is it not awful to contemplate the mysterious chasm between a man or woman's appearances in the world and the passion roiling beneath. “If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?” They might have been demons inventing in the course of their eternal dalliance all the carnal lusts bequeathed to humanity down the ages.

Patience I suddenly saw on the other side of the wigwam where Higgins must have tethered her after, perhaps, coming upon her himself in the wood or meadow.

When, near mid-day, these two had spent their final passions and lay by the river caressing one another, I took my secret leave. I went about my labors avoiding any more than necessary conversation with Higgins upon his return to my house as one who had been away many weeks. He came leading Patience and smiling, as if he had had great success in his trade and was bestowing upon me a gift. I was just able to keep up enough conversation to avoid his suspecting me. I could not then, nor can I now, expunge from my mind the sight of them wrapped like two great blacksnakes, as we find hereabouts, biting and wreathing about one another in their frenzied, sunlit copulations. It was as if a gate had opened upon another world that mocked my own temptations and sentiments; nay, as if all the hopes and aspirations of fragile humanity were mocked, all our small pleasures and all the ancient works of God upon the earth.

I felt, and now feel, that bleak, oppressive certainty that the Kingdom of Satan rules all, that we are all foolish creatures
and dolls, and that the laughter beyond the gate is the blast of Hell. “Behold, I will make my words in thy mouth fire, and this people wood, and it shall devour them.”

June 23, 1647

This is a sorrowful mid-summer's time, for an epidemical sickness has come among all—Indians, English, and it is told Dutch and French as well—that takes like a cold and light fever, but upon bleeding or using cold drink, kills some, while others inexplicably recover in a few days. Worse yet, a ship from Barbadoes and the Indies was isolated for a plague and great mortality there. Many cannot but despair.

August 20, 1647

Mr. C. returned today. His tropical sojourn has ended.

There was a clatter before the house, I looked out the front door, and there he was, dressed in light clothing, stepping down from a horse cart driven by a Negro man and full of trunks and cases. I quickly closed the door and drew my breath, trying to calm myself while he directed the man in the unloading of his impedimenta.

Later, I discovered that he had hired the man and his truck at Strawberry Banke, taken a river barge up with the tide to the landing below the falls, and ridden the cart sitting beside the truckman right up to our door.

While the truckman carried the boxes to the house, I collected myself and ran out to greet Mr. C. Immediately I saw that he was changed. Not only was I surprised at his sun-darkened flesh, his loss of fifteen or twenty pounds, his loose light clothing, but I was taken by his face and eyes, by his peaceful demeanor and speech. Here was a man who looked upon me with interest, as if two faulty years of marriage had been
wiped clean. We might have just arrived in the New World. The source of this transformation I am never more likely to know than I knew at that moment.

This evening we walked about our garden, inspected every outbuilding, promised to walk to our planting fields in the morning. Whatever outrage I had stored to unleash upon his possible return he has completely disarmed. All the more so since he begs forgiveness for his inexcusable and unhusbandly behavior toward me previously. He promises to be my husband and true companion, and he asks me to take whatever days or weeks might be necessary to consider whether such a life together might be possible. At that moment, as at this, I confess I do not know what might be possible between us. My instinct tells me to think it unlikely. But it will certainly require my consideration—the implications for a lone woman are so pregnant and uncertain—and there is of course my confusion over Jared Higgins.

Our first night together, however, Mr. C. related his travels and adventures, albeit in far too much detail and number to record here. He ranged through Brazil, Barbadoes, Christophers, the Summer Islands, Grenada, St. Lucia, Guadeloupe, and so on, hiring his passage in English, Dutch, French, and Portuguese ships. He promises to tell me of six weeks spent in Spanish captivity headed into a life of slavery until an English privateer, in turn, took the Spanish ship.

He seems pleased by the state of my household and his lands. So much has passed between us since his arrival that I will stop to record only that he further demonstrated his new sympathy with my own state of mind by offering to sleep, for the indefinite future, in his own chamber, where he has stacked a princely collection of books and specimens in cases piled to the ceiling. His last words to me were: “Let us be off, now, to sleep. Think on all I have said, and will say, these coming weeks, and
then in good time we shall decide how it is that we are to regulate our lives.”

I go to my bed this night strangely happy, strangely sorry, asking the Lord again to guide me and forgive me. As I contemplate my transgressions and my share in fleshly corruptions to which all are prone, even the mastering desire to sleep confronts my secret kernel of fear, viz., might the slightest provocation unbalance him once again, or might this transformation be but another guise of the husband I had so painfully learned never again to trust?

October 10, 1647

As to the change in Mr. C., let me record that he has not cast off his predisposition to study. Rather, his preoccupation has somewhat abated. Of course his present need to pore over his specimens and books is substantial, and he spends hours daily closeted with these materials, pursuing his lodestar. But he now emerges from his study, and upon these occasions is more energetic than melancholic. In brief, he looks upon the world with a human eye.

He says little more of his previous behavior toward me, as if that were a subject too painful to discuss. To all appearances, I seem to have regained the man I married. Yet I cannot say whether I will ever again be capable of responding to him as my husband. Of course to the world, that is a wife's duty, but he makes my burden easier by his cordial distance, allowing me to determine the nature of our relations. Lately, after evening tasks, we have been spending a late supper and evening in conversation. I come to treasure his exotic tales of slave traders, gigantic serpents, strange savages and practices, enormous tides and rivers, unendurable heats and rains and mists. In his turn he seems as fascinated by tales of my daily rounds and events here. He praises Higgins' tireless labors.