I’m leaving my house, right, John and our son already out in the fields. I’m getting the logs, as one doth, minding my own, when those three steely faces turned to me. Oh, their chaste little bosoms, their pious little smiles. Women who think they are better than I. Than us, the servants. But we weren’t their servants, nay, not any longer. One year out of indentured servitude but watching them look at me, you’d never know it.
I took enough of those glances in London—I shan’t be needing them now, mistresses, I yelled across the gardens.
Alice, the governor’s wife, covered her chest. Susanna put her hand on her hip. Elizabeth went back to her weed pulling. Revelry, it was, to rile them.
Sing for your supper, that is what my mum did, sang for her bloody supper, and I did what I had to, did I not? To pay Weston for this journey. Given how we lived on the Mayflower, on the wet ship floor with the rats nibbling our toes, he should have paid us. When my feet first fell upon this land, I had in mind to return to the ship’s Master and say, Take me back. This was not the ticket I purchased. We agreed to seven years of labor with respectable, ordinary English people. We agreed to seven years of servitude in Virginia, not Plymouth. But oh no, no, no, William Bradford had an answer. My kind, my common kind, we are never given what we are promised.
It made our men sour, to put up with what they did, in England and in Plymouth. The chimney sweep boys, the Thames fetchers, when every man you walked by in London was a man thinking he could buy whatever he wished for—a biscuit, a black hen, a backside. And they could, could they not? That was these puritans. You couldn’t say that word to their faces though. They claimed it was slanderous. It wasn’t. It was truth. I knew as soon as they put their self-righteous boots on the Mayflower they would be trouble. Asking us to quiet our singing, scowling when we passed the time by dancing.
They would not let us return.
The Master of the ship said, like a magistrate, Sorry, Mistress Billington, but there is not the food to feed you on a journey back to England.
And when our seven years were complete what did my husband get? What did we get for caring for all those weak, dying creatures, for surviving when most of them did not? The smallest plot in all the colony, that is what we got.
So when those hypocrites looked their cherubic faces my way and claimed themselves to be the saints and I, a stranger to God? Ho, ho, I said to them. They were as flimsy in mind and spirit as saplings. I feared them not, and loved their surprise at my bawdy self. With pleasure, my dears, with pleasure.
Call me a groundling, but I dare you to call me a thief, a liar, or a whore. Sure, those puritans did not say it to my face, but they knew what they were and so did I. And God. I liked to remind them of that when they passed by me and glanced out of the corner of their eyes, or when they stared at my good right hand, with dirt in the nails, that had been in God’s clean earth, doing the gardening, planting seeds, presently reaching for our shared bread in the basket, or a sliver of butter.
When I saw Susanna hold her gaze at me, and Alice try not to, oh what fun, oh what joy it was to say, God is always watching, isn’t He?
I preferred my breath to be nice and garlicked, keeping away the illnesses those dour ones kept giving us. The illness that killed my son John.
My sons, I did let them run. I did not keep them behind a fence. My boys could not even pretend to be a fox without those dour ones having their say in my childrearing, tipping off the boy’s fox ears and saying, If you disguise yourself, you betray God.
John the younger, rest him, came back after exploring for two weeks, wearing a string of shell beads around his neck, running to me, not scared, but asking instead if he could go back, begging me, really, to return with the Nausets. Of course I hit him, slapped the back of his head, sent him staggering forward, but I smiled, too. My boy was not afraid. The only things I hoped he feared were me and his father. When he died, how did our governor comfort us? By denying us his parcel of land.
I did not want Francis to fear these gnats, or take the same fate, so I encouraged him to leave as soon as he could. Even when the hypocrites drank—which they did, often—they tried to hide any enjoyment they got from it. The most fearful people I ever set eyes upon. Excepting my grandmother about her priest, my grandfather with the magistrate, and my husband about all snakes.
Which meant they could be easily batted around by fearmongers. Captain Myles Standish—Captain Shrimp, to us—enjoyed it. That hired soldier thought himself right and how easy it was for him to say to Bradford, But the Savages, Governor. Who was the governor of New Plymouth? If ye asked me, I would say Captain Shrimp.