Once, crossing the bridge on the way to the market, as girls, we passed a man. In his eyes was a look that no longer submits. Alice glanced at me as if to say, What will happen? But I kept my eyes onward.
The man in the stand beside ours, the one who would later make coins disappear and re-emerge for my John, said, Girls. A man has jumped.
The vendors were leaving their eggs and vegetables, were surging toward the canal to see the spectacle. We were no different. I carried Prince, the black fowl I told my father was just, for some reason, not selling.
Along the canal, we pressed forward. A body lulled back and forth with the water. Dead. A man pulled him out. From the crowd, a woman screamed and ran forward.
In England, self-murder was a crime punished by God and the King. In England his wife would owe the King his possessions. But in Holland, his debts were absolved. In Holland, a man had dominion over his body. In Holland, a wife could grieve. Long after, I thought of the woman running forward.
Why think of this? William would say, and turn back to his work. He would go back to the loom, go back to the fire, blow gently on the little flame. His interest was in perseverance. He looked to how God deemed us favorable and turned away from that which did not fit. Sadness only entered if it showed how God tested, but how He prevailed us.
Alice and I made up stories about the man we had seen earlier that morning. He’d gambled his week’s wages and, stepping out on the walk home, sobered by the sunrise and reconsidering what he had just done, and who would not be fed because of it—his growing son, his patient wife, his young daughter—he concluded the world would be better off without him. He crossed the bridge to take himself home, stepped instead to the side, and after we passed and went forward to the market, he, perhaps considering his decision to be the best thing he had ever done for anyone else, his least selfish act, jumped.
Who wants to join a colony where the governor’s wife was so inconsolable she committed self-murder? Instead, one wants to join a community founded on freedom. A place in God’s honor. Where beaver is so plentiful, one cannot catch and skin them all. Where, as William wrote, The schools of fish will never leave one hungry.