gathering up hardened knobs of fruit.
He turned to Martha and said, “There are men coming.”
She looked at him without understanding. The skin under the constellation of brownish flecks across his face had gone pale, his mouth constricted and dry. He cast a searching glance towards the house and whispered, “Two men, Englishers, came through Salem lookin’ for Thomas. That was weeks ago.”
The skin on her scalp pulled tight, like a drawstring on a sack. “What do you mean, ‘men’?”
John breathed out and carefully grasped her wrist. She looked down at the hand and realized he thought she would bolt away in fright. He said, “Murderers, bully boys, paid by the Crown to bring back the traitors. They’re not colonists, of that we’re sure. The news has come to us from sympathetic men.”
Throughout the days and weeks that Thomas had recited to her his story, reeling out history in parceled bits, furtively and in hushed tones, Martha had never spoken aloud the word “traitor,” but it lay in the back of her mind like a canker. It had caused her to lie in bed at night, trembling, images of slaughter and mayhem forbidding sleep until she had daylight enough to commit his words into the diary, the quill across the paper helping to empty her head of terrifying thoughts. But then night would come again, and the scraping of branches on the roof became the beetling movement of the little wooden stake in Thomas’s great oaken chest, awakened through her touch.
“The thing is, missus, these men, they’ve gone to ground.”
“Gone to ground,” she echoed. She anxiously scanned the surrounding woods, realizing that both John and Thomas had known of these bounty men for weeks. “Perhaps they are lost, or have turned back.”
“Or are biding their time,” said John. He had been holding on to her wrist and let go only when Martha looked with alarm at his fingers tightening painfully on her skin.
“How will they come at us?” she asked, panic rising to a hard knot in her throat.
“If they’re still alive? By stealth. By surprise.”
They turned for a moment to watch Joanna, who had been joined by Will. The boy stood listlessly by, watching his sister piling apples into her apron. Behind him in the distance, Thomas had stepped out of the barn for a breath of air. The sun at his back, Thomas’s every feature was erased into blackened silhouette, his stance deceptively calm. His head swiveled in a practiced arc, easily scanning the surrounding forests and fields; but Martha knew that Thomas’s peculiar stillness was anything but passivity. It was a marshaling of strength towards some pending skirmish.
Will had come to her, peevishly burrowing his head in her lap. “My head hurts,” he said, his hands cupped around his ears.
“It’s all of your meanness, Will, blocked in your skull.” His hair spiked up in dampened clumps and she gave one a playful tug, running her hand absently over the taut curves of his face. She felt the scorching skin on his cheek and quickly she pulled him up to face her. He was flushed crimson, his bottom eyelids pooling with fever tears, and even as she held him, she felt through his shirt the onset of shuddering chills. Martha could hear behind her shoulder the intake of breath and the muttered oath as John saw for himself the sickness in Will’s face. Martha grabbed him up and ran for the house, forgetting for the moment the bounty men and any fear beyond death in the form of a spreading pox.
IT TOOK THREE days for the rash to blossom, first appearing on Will’s tongue in white sloughing pustules, his fever continuing to rise until he lay alternately sweating and freezing within the blankets twisted between his thrashing legs. The men were sent to live in the barn, their meals carried out from the house along with the news of how the boy fared. Joanna was taken by John to the Toothakers, the child to be kept until the contagion had past.
The women hourly bathed Will’s face with cool cloths, forcing him to swallow spoonfuls of water or broth even as he vomited into a bucket at his side. By the fourth day he lay still, his eyes sunken into their sockets, shallowly breathing, so that Martha was forced to stoop again and again to feel his feathered breath on a finger.
Patience had been calm through the beginning crisis, and Martha was grateful that her cousin had rallied her full attention to her son, lovingly holding him as they changed his shirt or replaced fouled linen for clean. But as Will responded less to their commands to drink or eat or roll over, a hysterical note began to creep into Patience’s voice. On the evening of the fourth day, Patience burst into tears and, gathering Will into her arms, rocked him roughly while pleading, “Will, be a good boy now. Will, do you hear me? You must get up now. You must get up.”
Martha, as gently as she could, pried her fingers from around the boy and laid him back down on the bed. It was the bed that Daniel had brought to Patience upon their marriage, and Martha knew it would never be shared by Patience and her husband again. If they survived, it would be burned along with the quilt soaked through with Will’s fever sweats.
On the morning of the fifth day, Will seemed to rally, his fever and chills subsiding. He opened his eyes, asking for bread, and cried plaintively when he was told he could have only broth. He watched the women moving about the room with glittering eyes, too weak to move, except to swallow the spoonfuls of liquid poured into his mouth. By noon his fever had spiked again, his breathing increasingly labored, and when his mother, sitting at the edge of the bed, bent down to comfort him, he whispered, “I want Martha.”
Martha had been standing at the foot of the bed, but before moving towards him, she instinctively looked to her cousin. A stiffening had begun the length of Patience’s spine, a lowering of the head, a tightening of the shoulders. Patience, without turning around, said to Martha, “Please get more water.” The words were spoken quietly, but rage filled the space like a sickroom smell, and Martha quickly left to fill another basin with water.
She paused briefly at the front door and saw that Thomas had begun an agitated pacing in the yard. Seeing her, he paused, searching her face for some sense of resolution. She shook her head once and turned away, returning to the bedroom door, where Patience was waiting for her.
Martha came up short, the basin slopping water onto the floor, taking in the furied, twitching muscles on her cousin’s jaw, the corded muscles at her throat. Patience had placed one hand on the door frame, the other on the door itself, barring Martha’s entry back into the bedroom. Patience tried once to speak, her lips trembling with emotion, and, after a shuddering breath, demanded, “Why are my children dying?” She stared defiantly at Martha, then closed and latched the door.
Will succumbed during the night. Martha knew the exact moment of death, even as she sat at the common room table, locked out of the sickroom. Patience had begun a low, muffled moaning, as though she had buried her face in the bedclothes, repeating “no, no, no,” over and over. Her voice soon rose in pitch to a shrill keening that went on until Daniel, driven from the barn by her screaming, threatened to take the door off its frame. When Patience unlatched the door, she collapsed at his feet, and Martha staggered to her own bed. She thought sleep would come, exhausted as she was, but she found the porcupine on the pillow that Joanna had left behind, the toy that Will had so gleefully tried to dismantle, and she wept, tearing at her pillow.
At dawn, wrapped in a quilt, Will was taken for burial. Daniel drove the wagon, Patience walking behind him like a penitent. She would not look at Martha and angrily pulled away when Martha reached out to touch her shoulder. After the wagon had pulled out of sight, Martha stood gazing at the pale crimped clouds and the arrow- shaped flock of birds surging south, like the wake from the prow of a great ship, and felt a desire to settle into the ground, resting there for the whole of winter, blanketed by the weight of snow. For the first time in days, fearful thoughts of the bounty men surged in her head, mixing with her grief like a noxious poison.
As she stood in the yard, she felt Thomas’s presence, and before his arms could enfold her, she had begun an open-mouthed, anguished sobbing, threads of saliva mixing with tears on her chin. She had shed tears the night before, the bereft and insistent weeping of loss. Now was the futile cry of the wet nurse, breasts still swollen and leaking milk, who had tended and night-watched the dead child of her heart; the wail of the stepmother, the caretaker, whose own cries must not be heard above the din of the helpless parents.
He took her arm and led her stumbling and blind onto the path to the river. They climbed slowly up and over the embankment, their clothes soaked with the heavy dew on leaves of ferns clotting the rise, until Thomas finally settled her on the fronds at the water’s edge. They sat close together and for a while Martha wiped at her face with her apron, soon wet through with her tears, and followed aimlessly the course of eddies and shallow pools not yet filled with autumn rains.
“I told you I had a wife in England,” Thomas began. He had turned to face her, bringing his arm tentatively
