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robbed the alderman of.
"What's this?" he says in his innocence. Just then it rang the hours of
twelve, it being noon, and he screetches out, drops it, it breaks apart, the
wheels and springs scatter on the ground, and my husband, poor, superstitious
savage that he was for all he was the best man in the world, my husband fell
a-shaking and a-trembling and said the watch was "bad medicine" and boded ill.
So he went off and got drunk with the rest. I go through the papers in
the gentleman's pockets and find out we've put an end to the governor of all
Virginia and I tells 'em so, full of misgiving at it, but they was all so far
gone in liquor no sense to be had out of any of 'em until they slept it off
but just before sun-up next day the soldiers came on horseback.
They burned the ripe cornfields and set light to the stockade so it
burned and our lodge burned when the powder went up so I saw the massacre
bright as day. They put a bullet through my husband's head, he on his feet and
all bewildered, I got him out of the lodge when I first heard the fire crackle
but he was a big man, couldn't miss him. And the poor drunk, sleepy savages
all mown down. I got the baby in my arms and went and hid in the bird-scare in
the cornfield, which was a platform on legs with hide over it, and so escaped.
But the soldiers caught hold of my mother as she was running to the
river with her hair on fire and she shouts to me, seeing me fleeing: "You,
unkind daughter!" For she thought I was hastening to cast my lot in with the
English, which was not so, by any means. Then they violated her, then they
slit her throat. So all over quickly, by daybreak nowt left but ashes,
corpses, the widow mourning her dead children, soldiers leaning on their guns
well pleased with their night's work and the courageous manner in which they
had revenged the governor.
The babby bust out crying. One of these brutes, hearing him, came
beating among the scorched corn and pushes at the bird-scare, knocks it down
so I fell out, flat on my back, the baby tumbles out of my arms and cracks his
head open on a stone, sets up a terrible shrieking, even the hardest heart
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would have run directly to him. But this soldier puts his knee on my belly,
unfastens his britches intending to rape me, he'd need the strength often to
hold me down but all at once leaves off his horrid fumbling, amazed.
"Captain!" he says. "Look here! Here's a squaw with blue eyes, such as
I've never seen before!"
He takes a good handful of my hair and hales me to where the captain of
these good soldiers is washing his bloody hands in a basin of water cool as
you please while his men pick over the wampun and the robes for trophies of
war. He asks me, what is my name and whether I speak English; then Dutch; then
French; and tries me in Spanish but I will say nothing except, in the
Algonkian language: "I am the widow of Tall Hickory." But he cannot understand
that.
They found out I was not indeed a woman of the Indian blood at last by a
trick for one of 'em fetched my baby from where they'd left him bawling in the
cornfield and showed him his knife, making as if he would stick the sharp
blade into my little one.
"Thou shalt not!" I cried out while the others held me back from him or
I should have torn out his eyes with my bare hands. How they laughed, when the
squaw with feathers in her hair shouted out in broad Lancashire. Then the
captain sees my burned hand and calls me a "runaway" and says there will be a
price on my head over and above the bounty on the Indians. And teases me, how
they will brand my cheek with "R" for "runaway" when we gets to Annestown so I
cannot whore among the Indians no more, nor amongst nobody else. But all I
want is the loan of his handkerchief, dipped in water, to wipe the cut on the
babby's forehead and this he's kind enough to give me, at last.
When I got my babby back and put him to nurse, for he was hungry, then I
went along with the soldiers, since I had no choice, my mother and my husband
dead and, truth to tell, my spirit broken. And what squaws were left living,
that I used to call "sister", trailed along behind us, for the soldiers wanted
women and the women wanted bread and not one brave left living in that part of
the New World that now you might call a "fair garden blasted of folk". And the
river watering this earthly paradise running blood.
The squaws blamed me, how I had brought bad luck on them and; cruelly
repaid their kindness to me. But, as for me, my grief is mixed with fear over
the memory of the overseer I had the ears off of, that all this will end in a
downward drop, once I am back where the justice is.
We gets to a place with a few houses and they had just finished building
a church and: "Here is a morsel plucked from Satan," says the one that widowed
me to the Minister, who tells me to thank God that I have been rescued from
the savage and beg the Good Lord's forgiveness for straying from His ways.
Taking my cue from his, I fall to my knees, for I see that repentance is the
fashion in these parts and the more of it I show, the better it will be for
me. And when they ask my name, I give 'em the name of my old Lancashire lady,
which is Mary, and stick by it, so I live on as if I were her ghost, and all
her prophecies come true, except it turns out I was Our Lady of the Massacre
and I do think my half-breed child will bear the mark of Cain, for the scar
above his left eye never fades.
The Minister's wife come out of the kitchen with an old gown of hers and
tells me to cover up my breasts, for shame, but the child cries and will not
be pacified. Yet she is decent, and the Minister, also, as their acts now
prove for they would not let the soldiers take me to Annestown with them but
offered the captain a good sum of money to leave me with them, for the sake of
my innocent baby. The captain hums and haws, the Minister adds another guinea,
the fine soldier pockets the gold and all ride off and the Minister would give
my child some Bible name, Isaac or Ishmael or some such name. "Hasn't he got a
good enough name already?" says I. But the Minister says: "Little Shooting
Star is no name for a Christian," and a baptised Christian my boy must be if
his soul may be admitted to the congregation of the blessed though the poor
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