I draped my arms over the fence rail, eyes narrow as a cat’s. “I am too old for games.”
“Are you a pity?”
“Indeed.”
He sniffed the air. “Come here, then. Let me smell you.”
I snorted, but this was grievously immodest, so I clapped a hand over my mouth. His answering smile was a miracle, and I giggled to hold it fast, though the giggling smacked of greed. Why he didn’t make haste to dismiss me then (we’re some of us overwilling and run our best chance ragged, trample it underfoot), I’ll never know.
He said: “A pretty pity too, I wager. With a pretty laugh.”
The hand at my mouth was raw with cold and streaked with blood from my stumbling flight through the woods. I licked a knuckle clean and pulled my cloak tight, backing away from the fence. Moving a few steps through crackling twigs (how thunderous the world became, listening with Simon), I hugged the smooth beech for balance and peered at him from behind it. The moment seemed suspended, and when his empty gaze did not release me I gave what payment I could: “You wondered how I smell?”
Well, then, mused the upraised chin. Tell.
“Mother says like rain.”
Still on his chair, the blind boy with the man’s voice nodded gravely, sweetly, and my legs felt free again.
My earliest memory is of Mother’s strong hands holding me under water. It’s no proper memory, I know, but my young life’s unrest contained, at last, by her confession.
Embattled, my mother came like a sleepwalker (she revealed on a night when I was bedeviled by dreams—a night years after the fact and one year or so before this story begins) to the water’s edge with the same infinite pragmatism that once prompted her mother’s kitchen servant to drown kittens or wring the necks of hens. Killing her bastard would mean sure and swift punishment. A noose round the neck, God willing.
“Didn’t you love me even a little?” I asked, shocked but not shocked enough, apparently, to leave it be though I was in my seventh or eighth year at the time (I don’t know my count exactly) and content, as children are, with the here and now. Mother nestled closer under the bedcovers. She stroked my sweaty hair, kissed my brow, and wished all watery nightmares gone. What she did not do was answer my question.
In the coming days her silence lingered, and my dread grew. Did not every mother love her babe? Though my own failed to reply, she filled my hands and hours with dainty shells, with stones made smooth by the sea, with salty crab claws and the strange, spiny remains of fish. She held my fingers as the waves sighed their ceaseless sigh at our feet, beckoning, and in time as we gazed forth together without fear into the emptiness, I felt safe again.
This earliest of memories, then, is a figment. But in this memory (let us call it that) my mother’s hands, like her face with its startled look, are prison-bleached and jaundiced. She cannot hold them steady. Kneeling, she lays the infant me on wet sand, her body quaking uncontrollably with the urgings of the waves and the vast glare of life outside prison walls. She believes (Heaven and Hell were snuffed like candles in that dank jail) that peace will come with a shroud.
Froth tickles, folds soaking over me, and though the cold shock of the surf little resembles the womb, its mild rocking does. So my infant brain has scant cause for alarm until I feel the crush of her cheek against my chest. Rigid with despair, Mother is counting my heartbeats, one two three four five six . . . and then she is a fog moving away with hopes the tide will have me. When the tide won’t or won’t hurry, she reaches out, and in her thoughts, her mother’s onetime kitchen maid is singing.
It is only when I cease to hear my mother’s mad humming, when my ears and lungs fill with airless, fractured light, that I make out another voice. This voice is muffled and aggrieved, reproachful but tender (as Mother’s shaking-strong hands had been, holding me under). And I am plucked like a coin from beneath the tongue of the sea.
It was days before Mother finally answered my question: “Did I love you then? I loved no one, Pearl. No soul on earth.” Though she said no more, her dark eyes spoke for her. Had she courage, I understood, she would have walked into the water with me that day—long before our Puritan minister wandered into that remote bay from some faery realm, striding to my rescue and into his life’s mission to right the wrong of my existence.
My father (though I knew him not then) has in his notebooks over the years made fanciful much of Mother’s courage, though he never named her in those pages as he did me. Had she the courage he claims for her, both Mother and I would have perished in the surf. Instead we retreated to our little cottage by the bay near Boston, there to endure a thousand petty persecutions, outlast our wary love, and bide our time until he could return to claim what was and wasn’t his. Even now, as a woman grown and with the mystery of my father solved, I cannot unpuzzle my mother. But in those days it was my heart and history that consumed me.
“What was it like up there?” I would demand, brushing Mother’s dark hair, which with its wave and furtive gloss seemed to me a living thing. “On the scaffold?”
If she considered her answer, her face concealed it. “I felt as a friend to the breeze.”
Even I, at best indifferent to society’s rules, being fatherless and scorned by all but her, could not forgive this woman—who wore by law the letter “A” on her dresses for my sake, she was not above reminding me—her upright carriage, her terrible calm. It was an affront. “This fine noon,” I countered, letting my voice grow mighty like the minister’s, “I was nearly stoned to death by cretins.” Words hot and relentless as the noon sun must have been that June day years before, scorching her prison-pale cheeks. I thrilled always (and this shamed as punishment never could) to imagine it: Mother exposed on the weathered platform of the pillory while the governor in finery, flanked by sergeants and ministers, scolded from the meeting-house gallery. Was it weeks or months afterward that she thrust me on the sea? Days?
I’d attended my share of public stripings and shamings—idle bond servants, Antinomians, vagrant Indians turned lewd by the white man’s spirits—and could well picture the greedy masses milling at her feet, snickering over apples and gnawed cheese rinds. What I couldn’t see was my own small self wailing in her arms with no history, no memory. Her shoulders had cried out from holding me that long three hours, she had confessed once in a rare show of self-pity. “My arms quaked like rushes in the breeze.”
This night she waited till I’d had my fill of brushing and then stood, shaking her mane and padding barefoot in her nightdress to her stool at the spinning wheel. The heavy thump and whir began, a savage rhythm I despised. Mother’s hands were never at home at the wheel as they were with needle and silk threads. In the light of the fire she looked at peace, but what mother would see her child stoned? The world would have me sewn up in my burial cloth, Mother oft accused, before I learned to master my tongue.
An owl called from the meadow west of our cottage, and I felt my blood tug toward the flames. I went and sat at her feet by the hearth, contrite, and rested my cheek against the warmth of her leg. I thought of tiny mice scattering for their nests as white wings beat the grass to a froth. And then my mind fixed on the boy Simon, imagining him at his table in useless candlelight or, like me, propped beside the popping flames, content to stare at nothing.
I roamed west to spy on my quarry the very next day, and the next, and another. On the third day, the house servant—a red-faced woman Simon called Liza—was balanced high on the roof cleaning the chimney. Her stout frame struggled with a rope that held fast what sounded to be a goose. As she lowered the great bird, she called out to Simon on his chair in the yard to aid her. He didn’t mind her overmuch as a rule, I soon noticed, though there was nothing imperious in his bearing until she started to scold. Now, as before, he kept his hands imprisoned on his lap, as if they might fly away. Once he even sat on them, but he seemed to know it was no proper posture and set the hands free in his lap again.
The March day was grayer than those previous, and more raw. Liza struggled, and the goose echoed