It’s September again. The sun shines through dying leaves. My second husband gone twelve years, my first husband gone thirty-five. At the end of life, everything comes back to you as if happening today. What does it mean? Why did it happen? The revelation never comes. Instead there is my granddaughter, the sound of her feet running down the hall and small, daily illuminations.
There are seventy thousand English settlers living in one hundred and ten towns in this area. Three thousand people in ours. What if we would have landed farther north? I sometimes wonder. Boston thrives as it was easy to see, even in the year of our Lord sixteen hundred and thirty, it would—a big, deep port for ships, lusher land, and larger rivers.
Our one-room cottage has become the largest home in the colony, with seven rooms. My bed is veiled in a white curtain. Such privacy I have now, for dying. Privacy now when it matters little to me, except to shield my granddaughter from death. Elizabeth runs into my room in the mornings, saying, It is morning time, Grandmum. She likes to run her hands along the parchment of my skin. When I look into her eyes I know how fast the world is, how fast a life is. I pray for her a long one.
Our own little colony upon a downward slope is slowly sliding into the sea. So much that happens, happens imperceptibly. All creatures speak to one another, though so soft we cannot hear. The sound a ground mole makes to another cannot be heard by the human ear, but I am certain it exists.
The first spring flowers emerge, crack open, fall apart.
There is rarely a Sabbath I do not walk by the meetinghouse and find someone in the stocks. Drunkenness, adultery, fornication before or without contract, slanderous speech, cursing—these are the most common crimes.
The surviving orphan from the Mayflower, Richard More, lives. He is a seaman, but more famously, a drunkard, and when he visits the meetinghouse sweating off yesterday’s wine, when the women see him lingering amongst the vegetables in their gardens, the generation that is still here to recall what he lost—his mother and his siblings—grant him some forgiveness. Those who know his story treat him more forgivingly than perhaps they should.
We have made more laws. It does not seem to stop the crimes. Following the murder of Newcomen came accusations upon accusations.
Widow Warren brought her servant Thomas Williams to court for refusing to perform his duties. According to Thomas, Widow Warren gave him chores that required him to be out in the elements in the coldest days of winter. Chopping wood beyond necessity, mending fences, and the like. To his protest Widow Warren said, Thomas, fear God and do your duty. But Thomas Williams, worked up into a passion and distemper, replied, I fear neither God nor the devil. Widow Warren charged him with blasphemy. Thomas claimed a momentary lapse due to an imbalance of humors, but the governor did not agree, and he was sentenced to ten lashes in the public square.
I sometimes wonder if it has made things worse, the lawmaking and the punishments, giving them even more ideas—how to fornicate and abuse both people and animals. One young man who tried to quell his lust with cows, a horse, and three goats was hanged and the animals were slaughtered. All that death, and all of that costly meat, which of course, in keeping with the Bible, no one ate.
Buggery and sundry variations of other carriages have occurred. Women whipped and walked around the town by the elders as punishment. Good Wife Norman was found in a bed in lewd behavior with Mary Hamon. There is no law for this betwixt women. Good Wife confessed publicly and Mary, a single woman, was released. She has not been seen in Plymouth since. Men found lying together are hanged. But for women, a public confession is often enough. I see Good Wife Norman on Sundays in church. The confession righted her position in the community. I oft wonder if it relieved her, the revelation of a secret.
I recall the days of youth, dreaming on the hillside with Dorothy. Her hair falling down in front of her face. Her standing over me, singing a song of the poplar trees. The summer our bosoms needed support but did not yet have it. The morning we lifted off our linens and she turned to me. Sunlight through the flowers. Her breasts, firm as two bowls, where mine already began to drift. I went to her. We laced our hands together. Our bosoms touching.
Let’s practice, she said. For our husbands.
And so we did.
From my home in the center of town, I often smell the rotting corpses of wolves. Their heads are nailed to the side of the meetinghouse. Each man receives a bounty for trapping them. Wolves kill cattle and swine nearly every day.
With more from Europe arriving to this coast, men hasten to claim land as their own. A year after Billington’s trial, we had a minister, Roger Williams, that questioned how it was we came to reside upon this land and the land of our trading posts in Bourne and Kennebec—though the King’s signature was on our charter—and did we not owe the Indians? My husband promptly asked him to leave the colony. Indians do live amongst us. Fewer are the English indentured and more are the Indians, some as lifelong servants. But there is talk of unrest. The elders discuss the need for new laws to disallow the Indians from owning firearms, to disallow them from using their English Masters’ guns to hunt for their Masters’ fowl.
Our fur business in Kennebec is declining. The beavers have nearly disappeared—too many caught in too short of a time, or, perhaps, they have moved farther away from us. The colonists’ swine still trample on the Wampanoag’s crops, though now the Plymouth court has determined that it is the responsibility of the Wampanoag Indians to erect fences, if so it is the livestock do bother them. Most recently, the younger Plymouth men—my Constant amongst them—developed a deed granting themselves land at Pocasset.
What we value was worn away by relations with nonbelievers. Our children are intermarrying, here, as well, but instead of becoming too Dutch, as we feared when we lived in Holland, they are losing sight of God’s plan by the lure of Boston merchants and Quaker women.
John left this way, twenty-odd years ago, when he married Martha Bourne, and moved to Norwich. Though I like to think I was a mother to him, I confess it was not the same as with my own. God has not granted them any children.
The ones I bore myself stayed close. William the younger married Alice, who begot me ten grandchildren. Mercy, my only daughter, married Benjamin Vermayes in December of the year of our Lord sixteen hundred and forty-eight, but God saw it fit to take her before He did my husband, and without the gift of children. My youngest, Joseph, lives here with me, in this house his father built. He has one daughter and another coming. His wife, Jeal, is a comfort. I like to hear her in the mornings singing to my granddaughter.
Table scraps of what people once said to me come, unbidden. I am in my memories more these days than out in the field, my past more vivid than the present. Most mornings, I wake before the cockles’ crow. My thoughts are fast then and full of everything I wish I could take back.
I am forty again, laundering, my children kicking around my feet. A burden it felt, all those requests to be picked up when there were so many tasks to do. What I would give now though, to do it all again, to hear my daughter, two years old, say, Mum, please.
But I took time with them as I could. I stared into their eyes. And they grew strong and respectable and godly.
These are the memories I wish to have.
But there are others.
The next generation doth not remember what we sacrificed. In other communities, like Salem, the girls are defying their mothers, refusing to wipe the tables clean, laughing merrily while reading poetry but claiming illness when their mothers bring out the Bible.
Not our girls, I say. Not our girls. But one day I fear, it might be.
This is the way of generations, to remember a better time. Just as our parents thought we were losing our English manners in Holland and now we think this of our children. Even their voices are losing the inflections of our homeland. I have warned them, often, of retaining their English customs. The good ones, at least.
Nowadays, I must climb up to Burial Hill to visit my friends. The cemetery has the best view in Plymouth. We lost Elizabeth first, to illness in the year of our Lord sixteen hundred and forty. Susanna, fourteen years later. She and Edward had built a large estate they named Careswell when they were younger, but in the year of our Lord sixteen hundred and forty-six, Edward was called for by Oliver Cromwell to London. Edward had a portrait of himself done there and sent it back to Plymouth. In the portrait, he holds a letter signed: Your loving wife, Susanna. By the time the portrait arrived to Plymouth, Edward was a commissioner with the Royal Navy on a mission to gain control of Jamaica from the Spanish and his wife, Susanna, had left us for the Lord.
My will is written. I, Alice Bradford, being weak in body, but of disposing mind, do make and ordain this my last will and testament. Soon, I, too, will be buried. But my body will lie at the foot of my husband’s grave. Wills are like wedding vows, are they not? Prescriptive in phrase, but no less meaningful for it. Soon after Master Billington’s departure, my husband surprised me with a green gown to match the color of my eyes, which it pleased me to wear on special occasions—my children’s wedding celebrations and a few necessary gatherings of elders and wives in Salem. I promised the gown to Jeal. She is a plain-spoken woman and will wear it with dignity and without pride. The bed that was Dorothy’s mother’s, the one I now lie on, will go to my sister. I will give my eldest son, Constant Southworth, the heifers, a young mare, and the land at Paomet. To my youngest, Joseph, I will give one half of my sheep, the other half to Constant. To my middle, Captain William, the white oxen and the white heifer. The books, one hundred and fifty of them, will go to my friend Thomas Prence who was governor betwixt my husband’s long appointments, and a comfort in my widowed years. To my granddaughter Elizabeth, the only child of my deceased Thomas, I will give seven pounds. For my servant Mary, a calf, delivered to her next spring if I decease this winter, and next winter if I decease this fall.
All the remaining sundry are to be divided among Constant, William, and Joseph. John was given land by his father when he passed and I do not think to trouble him with a journey back to Plymouth for any of my affairs. When last I saw him, at his father’s funeral, I gave him his mother’s painting. For most of my life, I had my dearest consort’s bowls, her son, and her husband, but I did not have her. It is not right, William would say, to keep loss this close. But if I let go of grief, I let go of her. To be no longer grieving is to no longer have her with me.
I gave my husband’s book Of Plymouth Plantation to the care of Joseph. I wish to keep it close to me, for to do so is to keep William here, as well. Sometimes I enter the study and open it. In our hearts, we were pilgrims. Even though he has long since passed on to heaven, I am careful to return the book as I found it.
We longed for a better future in God’s favor, but in many ways, the colony my husband planned for was not a success. We live among the Anglican, as if we lived again with those who believed against us, who sided with those who punished us in England. When we left Holland, the truce between the Dutch and the Spanish was nearly ending, and here, the treaty made between my husband and the great sachem is ending—both men have perished. Some here want more and more, not stopping at God’s good grace. I feel tension growing. In many ways, our better future is an imagined past.
But my husband’s life—and what he left to me and our children—was far more prosperous than it would have been had he remained a fustian weaver in Holland.
Behind the house, at the edge of the garden, I have placed one of Dorothy’s bowls, deep in the earth’s soil, deeper than I hope she or he who lives here next will seek. I have placed her there so she can smell the lavender. I hope she soars high up with God. Perhaps we will meet again up there, if He deems it so.
The head has been taken down from the post above the meetinghouse, but the linen with Wituwamat’s blood still waves.