The Wolves of Andover

Their noisome corpses soiling the water’s courses.”

Both the children and the women squealed in delighted protest.

Patience had been good as her word, giving Martha two of her piglets for trade, and Martha regarded them, their snouts straining wetly through the wicker cage, thinking they would bring enough for a new winter cape and a mirrored candle holder. She had spent most evenings stealing a few moments to write in the red book before bed. It had begun with entries of so much wheat kept in the cellar, so much corn, so many seeds, all matters of the Taylor house. But more and more of her musings had turned to Thomas, recording not only the things he said to her, which were more often like the riddles she had told the children, but how he looked at her, much like a starving man looking at a pasty, as though he would devour it whole. Or, she mused, like a man on campaign, long used to depriving himself, warily wakening to the knowledge of his own hunger.

Within the half hour, they had entered the town green, the meetinghouse of Billerica situated on the northern end, its gray boards neatly patchworked with darker, newer planes of wood. The cemetery, already spilling from the front of the yard, spread like a stone curtain, first to its western edge and then to the back of the meetinghouse. To the eastern side sat the Reverend Hastings’s home, the minister she had turned away from Daniel’s table with her combative words. The house was small but with a wooden fence fortifying a generous house garden. A girl, perhaps seventeen, gracefully tended the garden, and Martha’s mouth twisted with the half- resentful thought that, though she was no doubt aptly servile as the minister’s likely wife, she was also quite young and lovely.

There were a dozen women on the green sitting close together, some with their willow-shoot baskets of early sprouts from their gardens, others with brooms or herbals. Apart from them sat or stood the men, coopers and potters, mostly idle as the harvest of summer grain had not yet begun but talking as noisily as the women. As John pulled the wagon up close, all talking ceased. The clump of villagers seemed to Martha like a hive of stinging insects, each contending for the highest position in the honeycomb, each with a stinger for a tongue. But unlike bees, which could sting only once and then died, these goodmen and goodwives could inflict the poison from their tongues again and again, like wasps. The buzzing ceased only so long as it took to scrutinize the new arrivals, and then the hissing was taken up again, no doubt, Martha thought, to the detriment of every visitor’s moral constitution.

Helping Patience from the wagon, Martha situated her cousin among the townswomen and went directly to the weaver, a stout man with bowl-cut hair. She was soon disappointed, though, to see only a few coarse blankets from the weaver’s own loom laid out on the ground. When she told him she was looking for the goods to make a new cloak, he smiled and beckoned her to his wagon, where he removed from a sack a bolt of English wool. She brushed at the covering of dust lying like a second skin over the surface and saw that the cloth had an almost glistening sheen, the color of slate after a heavy rain, and when she tested the weave with her fingers, she knew she must have it. But he would not take only one piglet for the woolen, and she would not readily give up both, as she had in mind to acquire a new lantern as well. Martha held up two fingers covered with grime to show the man she knew the cloth had long been in the wagon, too dear for any local villager to acquire it; and so it had rested there, perhaps for many months beyond the sea passage from England.

“But look here,” he said, “I have waited near eight months, eight months, for this cloth.” The weaver frowned, shaking his head. “Look at the weave. Feel the weight. Why, the shade of it is a mirror to your own eyes. Look here, missus, do not ask me to come so far down.”

“No,” she said, pinning him with her eyes, responding no to every one of his entreaties and proclamations of sacrifice in giving her back coin as overage on the second pig. Martha had seen enough of her father at bargaining to know when to stand and when to walk away. She shook her head and, giving the cloth over to the weaver, turned around. After twenty paces the weaver called out, “Very well, missus, I will give you back your sixpence, but it should be you and not I who tells my good wife of her newfound penury.”

Smiling, Martha accepted the cloth and the coins and pointed the weaver to the wagon to collect his pigs. When she asked him to direct her to the tinsmith, she was dismayed to see him gesture in the direction of a small outbuilding next to the reverend’s plot. The young woman in the garden had finished her work and had gone back inside, and Martha quickly walked to the small shed, hoping the minister would be in the meetinghouse and not at home. She knocked softly on the closed door and waited for the clopping of heavy footsteps of the tinsmith coming to let her in.

She heard the sound of jeering laughter coming from the far side of the green, and when she turned to look, she saw a small knot of children, and a few older girls, taunting something obscured by their swaying bodies. She shook her head, thinking how often a gathering of idle children meant the misfortune of some other child, or animal, smaller than themselves. A girl shrieked in gleeful malice and Martha’s face turned grim, remembering that children can often be sweetest before they turn bad.

The group parted, scattering into differing tribes of girls and boys apart, and she saw what they had been tormenting. A woman, bolted fast in the stocks, her head pointing towards her toes, cried loudly and bitterly to be freed. She called for water, and for pity, but the children had moved on with their games and no one else on the green gave her any notice beyond a nod of annoyance. Martha turned back to the door, and with her hand poised to rap again, it swung widely open, revealing a slight man in well-worn but clean linen and vest, and with the milky eyes of the blind. His chin pointed beyond her shoulder but his head cocked as though following the sounds of her breathing. “Good day,” he said formally. There was a slight pause, and he added, “May I hear your voice? To place you, you understand.”

“I’m here for a lantern,” she answered, casting one last look at the woman in the stocks.

“Ah, yes, of course,” he said and stepped aside, allowing her to enter.

The room inside was as shaded as a cavern, and she realized, as she moved hesitantly over the threshold, that he must work in darkness, as there were no discernible windows set into the walls, the only light coming from the fire pot close to the bench, faintly glowing with copper soldering fragments. He promptly closed the door and she stood in the blackness in uncertain silence. He walked confidently to his workbench and bent over the fire pot, lighting a short taper which he fit into a reflecting lantern.

The startling light revealed a workroom, well swept and orderly, with lanterns of differing sizes pegged to the walls. Baskets fronted the walls, some with cups and long-tined forks, some with smaller workpieces not easily identifiable. The bench was filled with tools, in exacting rows, from the most brutish-size pliers down to smallest, hair’s-width dowels and punches. The smith stood at the desk, fingering the tools gently, as if to assure himself of their placement. She stared at his hands, fascinated by their restless creeping, as though the fingers, long as alder whips, had been fashioned with too many articulating joints.

“I do not know your voice.” He had waited to speak, talking only when she had drawn in a breath to inquire about the lantern.

“I am Martha Allen,” she said, beginning to feel the acrid burn of the soldering pot behind her tongue. The smith raised his brows expectantly but said nothing.

“I would like a lantern. For evenings.” She had added the last foolishly, as if he would not know a lamp would be useless in daylight.

There was a slight pursing of the lips, and the man’s eyelids fell more heavily towards closing, making him appear at once disappointed and yet self-satisfied. “For evening reading, perhaps? Or for the keeping of personal writings?”

At his insinuating tone, she stiffened, remembering the red book sewn into her pillow casing.

He moved assuredly to the wall with the lanterns and asked, “Which one would you choose?”

“I would have something that gives greater light than a candle might. For the writing of accounts, you see. A reflecting lantern, like the one on your bench.”

He clasped his hands together, the long fingers dangling loosely at his groin. “Ah, the pity is I have only one, which, as you can see, is mine own.” He placed the slightest pause before the word “see,” tilting his head to the opposing side, and waited.

“That is a pity,” she said after a moment’s hesitation. “Well, then. I thank you…. My cousin Goodwife Taylor waits for me…”

She turned to leave but he surprised her by saying, “If you wish, I could sell you mine.” He returned to his bench, his hands encircling the base of the lantern.