The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel - By Kathleen Kent Page 0,50

fingernail over them, hoping to bring forth the sound of its maker from the clay, much as a finger will pluck the strings of a fiddle to bring music. I looked for Father and found him oiling with bear grease two sprung beaver traps that had belonged to my grandfather. He would set them on the southern fork of the Shawshin and harvest any pelts for a new cone of sugar, enough to last us the winter. When I showed him the piece of clay, he held it for a moment and said, “This was not made by Narragans or Abanak. They have no wheel to make such.”

“Who made it, then, Father?” I asked, feeling the chill of holding a thing ancient as the dirt below my feet.

He rubbed his knotted fingers over the pitted face of the clay and said, “Some as came before the Indian and are no more. The history of the world is such, Sarah. To build upon the bones of those who have come before. Thus it will ever be.”

That night as I lay in bed, I knew I would give the shard to Margaret. I could not make a gift fine enough to match hers. But I could give her something that was strange and wonderful and rare. I closed my eyes to sleep and dreamt I was wandering lost through a cornfield. I could hear Margaret calling to me, but wherever I followed the voice, it retreated into the stalks. The voice at last led me to the lip of a well and called up from the depths of the water below. Lying on the lip of the well was the glistening fragment of clay, wet as though risen up from the shaft. The voice floating from the well shifted and changed. It was no longer Margaret but some other girl, calling and calling. I walked to the very edge of the well and peered into the violet shadows and saw, reflected in the dark pool below, my own face. I woke, my face slick with tears, my chest an empty cask.

From that morning a growing resentment started to swell in my chest. I formed a hard and embittered resolution that my mother was responsible for all my losses. Because of her selfishness I was taken from Uncle’s family. Because of her ungovernable anger Uncle would not return to our house, perhaps refusing his family to visit as well. Because of her acid tongue our neighbors talked ill of us and gossiped freely in their homes and in Chandler’s Inn. I even worked my mind around Mercy’s towering deficiencies of character, overlooking her scheming and stealing and bullying, to blame Mother for turning the girl out of the house. Darkest of all were the grudges for the loss of my grandmother, as though my mother through neglect contributed to her death. And when I could no longer hold in my fury, I let out a long, despairing cry. So astonished was she by my wailing, she dropped the braided bunch of onions she was hanging over the hearth to dry. I stood facing her, my fists balled tight at my hips, and screamed, “Why must you take everyone I love away from me?”

Without a word, she picked up her cloak and beckoned for me to follow her out of the house. Expecting a beating, and a short return to the house, I did not wear my cloak, and the cool morning breeze licked at the sweat on my lip like a dog licking a salt wheel. Now it comes, I thought. She is finally to murder me and leave my bones in the fields.

With a glowering face I followed her, walking up and over the elevated path behind the house and through the long harvested fields towards Robert Russell’s farm. Then I thought, She is going to leave me with Robert Russell, and I will be made servant in his house. But we at length passed by his house and turned south into the forest of pine surrounding Gibbet Plain. I could hear a cardinal calling out, “Quit-it, Quit-it, Quit-it-now,” and I suddenly regretted leaving without my cloak, as the wind had turned cooler, ruffling the hair along my arms. I trudged behind Mother, picking her way confidently through the spaces between the trees, and wondered if she would walk all the way to Reading with me in tow. We broke through some branches of thinly spaced fir and entered onto Gibbet Plain.