Susannah Morrow Read online

  “I’m here, Judith.” The voice was low and soft. For the first time, I looked at the woman who had come inside with my father. My aunt Susannah.

  In the candlelight, she was only a bundle of clothing: a dark woolen cloak with a hood that covered her head and hid her face, sodden russet skirts that dripped as she moved. She left wet footprints as she came toward us. I could tell nothing about her. She was only shadows and the glisten of candlelight where it hit here and there on her face—a cheekbone, a nose.

  She smelled of fish and lemons, molding leaves and rain, and those smells seemed to make the blood scent of my mother stronger. She came up between my father and me, and he backed into the bed curtains to give her room, gave her my mother’s hand. Her own were gloved in black so that it seemed Mama’s pale fingers floated in the darkness. “Judith,” she said. “Judith, I’ve come all this way. I forbid you to leave me now.” She said it lightly, as if nothing were wrong, and I wanted to scream at her, She’s dying, can you not see?

  But then, my mother smiled, and it was not a feeble smile like the ones she’d given me or my father. It was the first real smile I’d seen on her face since this labor had begun, and with it came a light in her eyes that stunned me, that raised a blinding hope in my own soul. “Oh, Sister,” she said, “I have longed so to see you…again.”

  I glanced at Susannah then, to see what it was about this aunt I’d never met that could make my mother smile this way, but the hood still shielded her face. My father gestured to Goody Way, and the midwife scurried over, settling again between my mother’s legs, looking doubtful.

  “I hear you’ve a babe waiting to be born,” Susannah said. “What think you, Judith? Shall we try again?”

  An hour ago, my mother had barely been able to move. Ten minutes before, she had said she and the babe were for God. But now she tried to sit up. My father lifted her, helping her to settle against the bolster. She dug her elbows into the feather bed, and her face contorted, her whole body went stiff. She screamed. I pushed in to help her.

  “Charity,” my father said harshly. “Go on. ’Tis no place for a child.”

  “But, Father, she needs me—”

  “Your mother has Susannah now. Go on.”

  I could not make myself go. I could not leave my mother. Hope had settled into me now, but I knew it was a fragile thing. Everything could change in a moment, and I was afraid to walk away.

  “Once more, Judith,” Susannah was saying softly.

  I reached out to touch my mother’s bared leg; her skin was wet with sweat.

  “Leave us, Charity,” Father warned.

  Goody Way looked at Susannah. “You’d best make her hurry, or we’ll lose the child—if we haven’t already.”

  Susannah leaned close to my mother’s face, whispering something, and I could no longer see Mama, only the back of my aunt’s head, the water-soaked dark of her hood. I stepped back toward Goody Way because I had to—Susannah was filling up all the space—and the gathered bed curtains draped over my shoulders and against my arm. I thought if I stayed there, I would be half hidden, my father would forget me, but when I looked up, it was into his angry eyes.

  “Please don’t make me leave her, Father,” I said, but just then Mama cried out, and if there had been any relenting in his gaze, it was gone. I stepped away from the bed.

  “Again!” Goody Way shouted.

  Mama’s groan sounded like death. I jerked around, ready to run back to her side, but her scream stopped me. Then there was the sound of a baby’s cry, thin and breathless, so quiet it was unearthly. The baby was born; ’twas a miracle. A miracle that Mama had lived, that the babe I’d been sure would die was crying in this dark, close room. For a moment, I was dumbfounded. I saw Goody Way lift the child, the jerking of its arms and legs, and praise for the Lord’s kindness spilled from my heart in such a rush I could scarce control it. Thank you, Lord. Bless you, Lord…

  Then I heard the silence. My prayers fell away. I glanced at my father, who wasn’t looking at the babe at all, but only at my mother.

  Mama raised her hand. I was relieved until I saw how weakly she did it, how it seemed the motion took everything she had. In the quiet, her whispered “Susannah” was unbelievably loud. My father turned away. My aunt leaned close to hear my mother’s faint words, and suddenly I went numb.

  My mother was dying. Everything in the room pointed to it, every little sign and movement. I heard a rush of air—the hush of her spirit passing—and I knew: God had taken her to punish me.

  It was all I could do to keep from shouting No! when my aunt raised her head.

  “She’s gone,” Susannah said.

  My father went still; he closed his eyes and I saw his lips move: Dear Lord, bless my poor Judith.

  “No,” I whispered.

  “I’m sorry, Charity—”

  I shook my head, stumbling across the room. They stood back for me, but I would have gone through them to get to her. I fell into the bedstead, my eyes too blurred with tears to see anything but shadows, and then I sank to my knees beside the bed. “Mama,” I said, choking through my sobs. I fumbled for her hand, and when I found it, I clutched it hard; I held it so she could not leave me. “Mama.”

  It seemed I cried for only a few moments when I felt my father’s hand on my shoulder, when I heard his quiet voice. “’Tis enough, Charity,” he said. “She was a righteous woman. There was no sin in her. She is with God now.”

  No sin in her.

  My body went cold. God had taken her, but the sin was mine. The sin is mine. All she had done was to keep it secret to protect me.

  I squeezed Mama’s too-thin fingers and pulled them to my lips, tasting the salt of my own tears on her fingertips. Then I laid her hand gently on the bed rug and backed away, my tears for my mother still blurring my vision. I heard her last words to me ringing in my ears—God loves you—and I knew it wasn’t true. She was dead, and it was my fault. God did not love me, because if He had, He would have left my mother to prove He could forgive such a stupid, sinful girl.…

  “She is at last relieved of the misery of this world, Charity,” my father said quietly. “Would you cry for such a blessing?”

  ’Twas all the grieving I was allowed for my mother, and I tried to pretend it was enough. I wanted to fall to my knees and sob my sorrow and desperation against her cheek—but I was too old for such grief now. My father’s hand did not leave my shoulder, and I felt his pride at my reserve and reveled in those few moments of his approval even as I thought I would be sick.

  Then my father reached over and folded my mother’s hands upon her chest. When he knelt at her bedside, I moved into place beside him. Goody Way handed the babe to Susannah before she joined us, and together we stayed while Father’s prayer filled the parlor. “Dear Lord, we have been but lambs in the wilderness, led by this good woman. She has ever been Thy servant in word and deed, and we celebrate her return to Thy bosom and pray that Thou wilt lend Thy servants remaining here on earth guidance.…”

  I noticed that my aunt was not kneeling beside us, that she had stepped back toward the fire. She was not even listening to my father’s prayer. Instead, she was bouncing the baby and fumbling with the blanket Goody Way had wrapped around it, making little clucking noises. Suddenly she threw back the cowl of her cloak, and I saw my aunt for the first time.

  I could not look away, even as my father’s prayer droned on. Susannah’s hair was not covered by a cap, but pinned in a great heaviness at the back of her head. Some of it fell over her shoulders like sooty shadows.

  She was beautiful.

  It startled me. I had expected her to be old—after all, I thought of my mother as old, with her tired eyes and her hair nearly as gray as it was brown—but Aunt Susannah did not seem old. She was so beautiful that for a moment I fancied ’twas not the fire’s gold she was reflecting but some light that came from inside her, something so bright that I suddenly knew where my mother had found the will to birth that baby.
She had caught some of that spirit in Susannah Morrow’s face. I wondered that it had not been enough to keep her alive.

  As if my aunt sensed I was looking at her, she glanced over at me. For a moment, our gazes held, and she smiled. It was tender and sad and familiar. It was my mother’s smile.

  It struck me so hard I had to turn away. In the last months, I had seen that expression whenever Mama looked at me—that terrible, sad smile that only reminded me of how close I had come to damnation, of how all the prayers in the world might yet not bring God’s forgiveness.

  Chapter 2

  MY FATHER AND I SAT SILENT VIGIL AT MY MOTHER’S SIDE. I’D BEEN praying for strength, listening to the soft slough of water and the mewling of the baby as Goody Way washed her by the fire. Jude had awakened, though it was the middle of the night, and now she sat quietly huddled on the settle, clutching one of my mother’s chemises tight in her little hands.

  “Mama has gone to God, Charity? ’Tis true?” Jude’s small face looked wan and thin, too pale in the candlelight except where the tracks of her tears shone golden against her skin.

  My father made a sound—I could not tell what it was—and when I looked at him, his face was unreadable. I reached for Jude and said quietly, “’Tis true, Jude. Mama is with God.”

  “Will He take our sister too? Like He did baby Isaac?”

  Isaac was our brother who had died two years ago—only a few days after he’d been born. In that time, he’d never stopped squalling. Sometimes I still heard his cries in my dreams, along with Mama’s constant Hush, child. Hush-a-bye, now. I did not know what to say to Jude. There had been too many babies lost since my own birth. I remembered how, when Jude was delivered, I had refused to hold her for the longest time, sure that God would take her too.

  “God will do as He sees fit,” Father said. He sounded strained.

  Susannah knelt beside Jude. My aunt’s kind smile set a glow upon her countenance that was too beautiful to ignore. “You must believe that she will stay with us, Jude,” she said. “We can only hope that God—”

  “God will do as He sees fit,” Father repeated, this time sternly. “You must have faith, child. The Lord’s wisdom is not for us to understand.”

  Jude nodded, wide-eyed, and I envied her; how easily she accepted his scold. But Jude was quiet and easy; she bore chastisements with unflinching attention and then put them aside. I had never seen in her the same hunger I felt, the yearning for a kind word from our father.

  Susannah nodded toward Goody Way and my new sister. “The babe will need a name.”

  Father drew in a breath slowly. “Will she live?”

  “It seems so.”

  “Mama liked the name Deliverance,” I said quickly.

  “Deliverance?” Father asked.

  Jude said, “Can I call her Livvy, Father? Goody Hobbs is Deliverance too, and that’s what Goody Abbott calls her.”

  Father shook his head. “We shall call her Faith.” Then he murmured, “Faith” again, as if trying the word on his tongue and finding it a pleasant taste. “Aye. To remind us of what we could use more of in this household.”

  “You’d best find a wet nurse for this one, Lucas, or won’t be enough faith in the world to keep her alive,” Goody Way said from the fireplace.

  “A wet nurse?” Father frowned, and then he leaned his head back on the bedpost as if Goody Way had exhausted him. In only those few moments, he’d gone from us again, already distant. “God help me, I cannot think of that now.”

  I nearly jumped from the bed in my eagerness to help him. “There’s milk in the cellar. Shall I get it?”

  He nodded, and I hurried from the parlor to the narrow stairs just inside the front door. I grabbed the nearest betty lamp. The light gamboled from my hand, sending my own shadow swinging before me. As always, the cellar was dark and filled with smells: the yeast of brewing beer and the tang of cider, pungent onions, dusty dried apples hanging from strings, the moldy sharpness of aging cheese, and the faint sourness of milk.

  It was my chore each morning and evening to milk Buttercup and to pour off the milk into shallow pans for the cream to rise, and so even in the dim light, this task did not take long. I heard the talk upstairs, low voices that were only muffled rumblings through the floor, and I hurried, determined to show my father how quick I could be. ’Twas the most useful I’d felt since Mama’s labor had begun.

  I had just set the milk pan back on the shelf when I heard something.

  ’Twas a soft sound, like a sigh, but loud enough to hear above the spitting sing of the fermenting cider. I paused, listening, and then felt…something…the brush of air against my cheek, the faint rise of the hairs on the back of my neck. There was a presence here, and yet I was not afraid as I turned slowly toward the barrels of small beer lined against the far wall.

  There stood my mother.

  I gasped, afraid to believe what I saw, more afraid not to. “Mama?” I whispered.

  She tried to say something, but I couldn’t hear her words. I reached out to her…and she was gone.

  My hands shook on the pail handle; I felt my tears on my cheeks. I stared at the dirt wall, willing her to return. “Come back, Mama,” I pleaded. “Come back.”

  ’Twas then I heard little Faith upstairs, starting to cry, a high-pitched wailing that did not sound healthy to me, as if she could not get enough air into her lungs. I heard my father call, “Charity? What keeps you?” and with a final look back at the place my mother’s spirit had been, I took the milk upstairs.

  When I reached the hall, Goody Way stared at me oddly. “What ails you, child? You look pale.”

  “She’s just lost her mother. I’d think ’twould be reason enough for paleness, don’t you?” Susannah asked.

  I tried to gather my wits. “I’m well enough,” I said hastily, another lie to add to my sins. “Truly I am.”

  “Well then, bring the milk over,” Goody Way told me. “Have you a rag? A clean one, mind you.”

  I ran to get that too, and when I brought it back, the midwife sat on the settle and pulled the pail of milk close. I watched as she twisted the rag and dipped the end into the milk and tried to dribble it into the babe’s mouth. Most of it trickled over Faith’s red little cheeks. Her screaming grew louder.

  “You’d best start thinking now, Lucas,” Goody Way said. “Even if she takes to this, she won’t survive on it. She needs mother’s milk to thrive.”

  I so rarely saw my father look helpless. I looked up at him, standing next to the bed he’d shared with my mother, her body only a shadow beyond the curtains that looked gray in the darkness. I thought I saw hesitation and uncertainty in his eyes. And fear. Fear in my fearless father, in the man who I knew was afraid of nothing but God.

  He looked so bereft, I longed to comfort him, to be comforted.

  Perhaps he feels the same way. The thought came to me suddenly. I looked at him—yes, he needed me now that Mama was gone. Perhaps he would need me so much that he would love me at last.…

  “Is there no one who’s had a babe lately?” Susannah asked.

  “Hannah Penney,” I said. “Her Johnnie’s but a month old.”

  My father started. His dark brows came together. “No child of mine will be in that home.”

  I had displeased him again.

  Susannah asked, “Who is Hannah Penney?”

  “A neighbor,” my father answered.

  “Charity is right, Lucas,” Goody Way said. Her voice was mild, and it reminded me of the way my mother talked to him, that easy voice that always calmed him and made him listen. The voice I had never been able to copy, and would never have dared to use, in any case. “Hannah’s loyalty is to her husband now.”

  “George Penney is involved enough with Tom Putnam for the both of them,” Father said. “And Hannah’s father has too much invested in Putnam to let his son-in-law make his own decisions. Who do you think was behind George’s purchase of those three acres next to Putnam’s land? ’Twas Jo
hn Tyler. He’s got his nose into everything George does.”

  Goody Way sighed. “Lucas—”

  “George and Sam Nurse were arguing over a boundary just last week. ’Tis sure that Tom Putnam’s involved in all that too. There’s bad blood enough between him and Sam.”

  “That’s all in the past,” Goody Way protested.

  “Aye. But ’twill cause trouble in the Village Committee, and there’s enough argument there as it is. I won’t have my daughter exposed to it.”

  I wished I had kept quiet.

  Goody Way only shrugged as if she’d heard these things too often to care. “Will you be the one trying to feed this child, Lucas? She’ll be safe enough with Hannah, and you only a few hundred yards away. Thomas Putnam won’t be involving any infants in this, and well you know it. You send this babe over to Hannah, Lucas—’twill be the best thing all around.”

  My father didn’t answer. I saw him look to Mama’s body again, and then he glanced at me and rubbed the small beard on his chin, sighing as if I troubled him, and I wanted to creep into the darkest corner of the room. But then he turned to Goody Way and said reluctantly, “Very well. We’ll deliver her to Hannah when I take you home again. But ’twill have to be after the storm passes. The babe will drown in this weather before we can get half a mile.”

  Goody Way nodded. “’Tis the best thing, Lucas.”

  “’Twill give the child a better chance,” Susannah said softly. Her voice was low, like my mother’s, and there was a cadence to it that matched Mama’s rhythm; so for just a moment, I was confused. I found myself searching again for the spirit—’twas my mother I heard, and Susannah I saw, and I could not reconcile the two.

  My father turned back to the darkness, to my mother. He had already forgotten us—me and Jude and even my new sister, Faith. I knew because of the way he stood, that familiar stance. I felt as I had when I was thirteen and he’d come home one day to tell me that he’d made arrangements to send me out to the Andrewses’ home in Salem Town. I was past old enough to leave home, and they needed a servant. I had cried and begged him not to do it. I had run to him, throwing my arms around his knees to make him listen, and for just a moment, I had thought I’d changed his mind. I felt him soften, felt his hand on my hair. But then he’d pushed me away and gone outside, closing the door softly behind him.