Hour of the Witch(9)
“Thomas—”
“Silence thy carping tongue. Spare me.” He tossed the knife onto the wooden table. “Even a beast of burden deserves a rest. I will eat thy boiled salad and bread. But tomorrow I will expect a man’s dinner.”
She had barely been breathing as she had waited to see where this was going. When she saw that at the moment, at least, he had no plans to strike her, she stood and retrieved the wrought-iron pot and placed it on the table, careful not to make it appear that in either defensiveness or fear she had slammed it onto the trivet. Then she ladled the cooked vegetables into the wooden trencher. He was watching her intently. She uncorked the beer and poured his tankard only half full, hoping that despite the force of his gaze he wouldn’t notice. Then she sat down with him and waited for him to bless the food.
Finally, he spoke, but it wasn’t to pray. “Why not the pewter?” he asked. “Why art thou serving me dinner in a trencher like I’m one of the hogs?”
She realized that the heat of his anger was but shielded momentarily by a cloud. He wasn’t quite spent yet. “I am doing no such thing,” she tried to explain. “Some days we use the pewter and some days we don’t. Thou knowest that. I was in a hurry when I returned and I grabbed the first bowl I saw.”
“It is one thing to eat our breakfast off the wood. But not dinner. At least not my dinner. I am a miller. Or hast thou forgotten that, too? Was that white meat behind thine eyes so absorbed with the demands of boiling a bloody carrot that thou forgot thy husband’s calling? I think that’s possible, Mary. Dost thou agree?”
“I’m sorry. I’m very sorry, Thomas. What more can I possibly say?”
“There’s nothing to say. If thou art going to spend thy whole day taking care of everyone but—”
This was enough. She had been with their servant girl’s dying brother and Goody Howland. She stood up as straight and tall as she could, and then, looking down upon him, said, “Thou art drink-drunk, and all I’m hearing is the hard cider and beer talking. If thou dost want the pewter, I will get thee pewter.”
But before she could retrieve two plates from the cupboard in the parlor, he grabbed hold of her apron, causing her to stop short. “Thou mayest if thou want,” he said, rising ominously from his chair. “But thou shan’t be doing me any favors.” She thought he was about to hit her, and put her hands before her face.
“No,” he said, “if my wife insists on spending all her days taking care of everyone but her husband, then I am going to dine at the tavern, where I shan’t be expected to eat a boiled salad for my dinner, and they don’t dish out ale like it’s gold. A half mug? That is stingy. Awfully stingy. And no way for a wife to treat her husband.”
He released her apron and she lowered her fingers from her face. He was, much to her surprise, smiling—but it was a mean smile, cold and cruel.
“Thou art like a child,” he said, “a babe that knows it has misbehaved.” He shook his head and she honestly believed that she had been spared. He was leaving and the storm had passed. But then he lifted her by her arms—she sometimes forgot how strong he was—pinning them to her sides, and hurled her into the bricks along the side of the fireplace. She protected her face with her hands, but her fingers and elbows and one of her knees cracked hard onto the blocks. From the floor she looked up at him. He picked up the trencher with their meal and dumped it upon her, the herbs and the sauce still hot, but not scalding. He sighed and shook his head in disgust.
“Such is God’s creation: the boiled supper that is Mary Deerfield,” he said. “Well, He made the snake and the ass, too. Why not make a woman with white meat for a brain?” He happened to notice for the first time the flour dust on his shoulders and sleeves, and brushed it away. Then he left the house without saying another word.
* * *
Did other men treat their wives the way Thomas treated her? She knew they did not. What she could not parse was whether he acted as he did only because of his proclivities at the ordinaries (and at their house), or whether there was a deeper cause. Did he despise her because she was barren? Did he really believe that she was dull and his violence was tutelage? Was it something that was in him or—what might be worse—something that was in her?
After all, it seemed that he had never struck his first wife. Or, if he had, Peregrine had never said so. And she certainly seemed to harbor no ill will toward her father.
Still, as Mary cleaned up the mess and then cleaned up herself, she contemplated with sorrow and weariness the corruption that was eating away at her marriage.
We expect a man’s government of his wife to be easy and gentle, and, when it is not, something is amiss.
—The Testimony of the Reverend John Norton, from the Records and Files of the Court of Assistants, Boston, Massachusetts, 1662, Volume III
Four
Mary Deerfield’s mother did not dress the way she had in England—she brought only one of her satin gowns to the New World—but she did wear myriad shades of purple and green and gold, and in the summer and early fall, she hid the ties on her shoes with great rosettes of ribbon. She was a beautiful woman, like Mary, and though there was more white in her hair this autumn than there had been even the previous fall, it was still a largely bay mane that was shiny and thick. She was not tall, but her carriage was such that she could be formidable, and Mary believed that her lone disappointment in this world was the fact that only one of her children, Mary herself, had come with her husband and her to Boston. Charles and Giles were grown and had businesses to attend to in England. They chose not to uproot their blossoming families: their young wives and their infants. In Giles’s case, there was already an estate with a sizable number of sheep and cattle and hogs. Mary, however, had not had a choice. She was only sixteen, and though clearly there were young men who soon enough would have become suitors—and appropriate suitors, at that—her father felt the New World was both a religious calling and a way to build upon an already impressive trading empire. (Mary suspected the latter was of more consequence, but she would never have said such a thing aloud and grew frightened when she imagined what such thoughts suggested about the state of her soul.)