Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories Read online

  One day the old lass lies down and never gets up again and her cousins come and shift all the goods with a penn’orth of value to ’em but they could find no place for me in their house so I must shift for meself.

  I take it into my head to go to London, where I persuade myself I can make my fortune, and I walk the highway, sleeping in barns and hedges, for I was hardy, and makes good time – five days. When I gets to London, I stole my first penny loaf, to keep me from starving, which led directly to my undoing, a gentleman that spies me slip the loaf into my pocket, instead of raising a hue and cry, follows me into the streets, takes my arm, inquires: whether it be want or inclination that makes me take it. I flares up at that: Want, sir! says I and he says, such a pretty young ‘Lancashire milkmaid’ as I was should not want for nothing while he had breath in his body and so flattered and coaxed me that I went with him to a room with a bed in it in a public house where he was well known. When he finds I’ve never done the thing before, he weeps; beats his breast for shame for debauching me; gives me five gold sovereigns, the most money that ever I saw until then; and departs for, so he says, the church, to pray forgiveness, which is the last that I saw of him. So I went on the common with my first fall, which was a fortunate one, and the ‘Lancashire milkmaid’ was soon in a fair way of trade as the ‘Lancashire whore’.

  Now, had I been content with honest whoring, no doubt I would be dressed in silk riding my coach in Cheapside still and never eat the bitter bread of exile. But you could say that, when I clapped my eye on his coin, I was as if struck with love and though want made a thief of me, first, it was avarice perfected me in the art and whoring was my ‘cover’ for it since my customers, blinded as they were with lust and often fuddled with liquor, were easier to pluck, living, than geese, dead.

  It was a gold watch out of the bosom of a city alderman that took me to Newgate for I quarrelled with my landlady over my rent and she took his complaint of me to the magistrate out of spite. So, just as my old Lancashire mistress said, I sailed the Ocean to Virginia but I went in a convict transport. They burned my hand, to brand me, as they used convicts, and sold me to work my sentence in the plantation for seven years, after which they said I should be a free woman again.

  My master took a liking to me, for I was not yet aged above seventeen, and he had me out of the tobacco fields into his kitchen. But the overseer did not like it, that I should get the taste of his whip no more, and pestered me unmercifully that, since I had been a whore in Cheapside, I should not play the honest maid with him in Virginia. Coming at me alone in the house, my master having gone to church, it being Sunday morning, this overseer thrust one hand in my bosom and the other up my skirt, says I shall have it whether I wants it or no. I picked up the big carving knife and whacks off both his ears, first one, then t’other. What a sight! blood enough for pig-sticking; he roars, he curses, I runs out into the garden with the knife in my hand, it dripping.

  Seeing me in such a fluster, the gardener coming up with a basket of vegetables cries: ‘What’s this, Sal?’

  ‘Well,’ says I, ‘the overseer just now tried to board me and I’ve had the ears off him and would it had been his pillocks too.’

  The gardener, being a good-natured kind of Negro man and a slave, hisself, and hisself tickled once too often by the overseer’s whip, cannot forbear to laugh but says to me: ‘Then you must be off into the wilderness, Sal, and cast your fate to the tender mercies of the savage Indian. For this is a hanging matter.’

  He gives me his handkerchief with his bit of dinner in it and a tinder-box he had about him, which I stow away in my apron pocket, and I show the plantation a clean pair of heels, I can tell you, adding to my list of crimes that most heinous: escape from bondage.

  I am a good walker as you may judge from my trudge from Lancashire to London and by the time night comes on and I sit down to eat the gardener’s bit of bread and bacon there are fifteen odd miles between myself and the plantation and rough going, too, for my master had cleared land from the forest to grow his tobacco. My plan is, to walk until I gets to where the English have no dominion, for I have heard the Spaniards and the French are on this coast, as well, and there, I thought, I’d ply my trade amongst strangers, for a whore needs nowt but her skin to set up business.

  You must know I had no knowledge of geography and thought, from Virginia to Florida but ten or twelve days’ march, at the most, for I knew it was very far and could think of no distance further than that, for the great vastness of the Americas was then unknown to me. As for the Indians, I thought, well! if I can keep off the overseer with my knife, I’d be more than a match for them, if I should meet them, so slept sound under the sky, took a bearing by the sun in the morning and went on.

  I had clean water out of the streams and it was the season of berries so I made my breakfast off a bit of fruit but my guts began to rumble by dinner-time and I cast my eye about for more solid fodder. Seeing the brakes full of small beasts and birds unknown to me, I thought: ‘How can I go hungry if I use my wits!’ So I tied my shoestrings together to make a little snare and trapped a small, brown, furry thing of the rabbit kind, but earless, and slit its throat, skinned it, toasted it on the end of my carving-knife over a fire I made with the blessed tinder-box the gardener give me. So all I wanted was salt and a bit of bread.

  After I eat my dinner, I saw how the oak trees were full of acorns at this season and thought that I might grind up those acorns between two flat stones, with a bit of effort, and so get a kind of flour, as had been done at home in times of want. I reasoned how I could mix this flour to dough with water. Then I could bake the dough in cakes in the ashes of my fire and have bread with my meat. And, if I wanted fish on a Friday, as was my Lancashire lady’s custom, I could tickle the trout with which the stream abounded, which is a trick every country girl knows and not unlike picking a pocket. Also, it seemed to me, if I dried the mulberries in the sun, they would eat sweet for a month. When I got so far in planning my diet, I thought: why, I can get along here very well in the woods on my own for a while even if I must eat meat without salt!

  For, I thought, I have steel and fire and the climate is temperate, the land fruitful; this earthly paradise surely will provide for me! I can build a shelter out of branches and bide my time until the fuss over the lop-eared overseer dies down, then make my way South in my own good time. Besides, to tell the truth, my nostrils were too full of the stink of humanity to relish a quick return to the world in some bordello in Florida. But I thought that I should travel on a little more, for safety’s sake, into the deep wilderness, so that no hunting party might find me and return me to the noose. Of which I had a very powerful fear and, I may tell you, more dread of the white man, which I knew, than of the red man, who was at that time unknown to me.

  So I walked on another day, taking my living from the country easily enough; then one day more and never heard a voice but the birds’ whistle; but the day after that I heard a woman singing and saw one of the savage tribe in a clearing and thought to kill her, before she killed me, but then I saw she had no weapon but was picking herbs and putting them in a fine basket. So I steps back to hide myself from her lest she be some Indian servant of a planter, although I do think that I walk, now, where no person of my country ever trod before. But she hears the leaves move and sees me and jumps as if she’d seen a ghost so that she knocks over her basket and her herbs spill out.

  I never think twice about it but step across to pick up the spilled herbs for her as if I was back in Cheapside and run to help some fruit-seller that overturns her basket of apples.

  This woman sees the brand on my hand and grunts to herself, as though she knows the meaning of it and will not fear me for it, or, rather, does not fear me because of it, but, all the same, does not like the look of me. She holds back from me though she takes her basket from me again as if to leave me in the forest. But I am struck by her looks, she is a handsome woman, not red but wondrous brown, and it came into my mind to
open my bodice, show her my breasts, that, though I had whiter skin, I could give suck as well as she and she reached out and touched my bosom.

  She was a woman of about middle age dressed in nowt but a buckskin skirt and she grunted when she saw my stays – for I still wore my English apparel, though it was ragged – and motioned me, as I thought, that whalebone was not the fashion among the Indian nation. So off go my stays and I throws them into a bush and breathes easier for it. Then she asks me, by signs, to give her the big knife I’d stuck in my apron.

  ‘Now I’m for it!’ I thinks but hands it over and she smiles, though not much, for these savages are not half so free with their feelings as we are, and says in a word I take to mean ‘Knife’. I say it after her, pointing to it, but she shakes her head and runs her finger down the blade, so I say, after her: ‘Sharp’. Or, a word you might put into English as: acute. And that was the first word of the Algonkian language that ever I spoke, though not the last, by any means. Then, seeing this old woman with a shape, not, as I can see, marked by child-bearing, and remembering the Virgin Queen my missus taught me of, I try her out with: ‘Shalom’. Which she politely repeats after me but I can tell it means nowt to her.

  She motions me: shall I go with her? I think the overseer will never come to look for me among the red men! So I goes with her to the Indian town and in this way, no other, was I ‘taken’ by ’em although the Minister would have it otherwise, that they took me with violence, against my will, haling me by the hair, and if he wishes to believe it, then let ’im.

  Their clean, pretty town was built within a low wood fence or stockade, the houses built of birchbark set in gardens with vines with pumpkins on ’em and the cooking of their meat savouring the air, as it was about dinner-time. They were cooking what they call succotash, a great pot on an open fire and a naked savage squatting before it, calm as you please, fanning the flames with a birchbark fan. The town was surrounded by tidy fields of tobacco and corn and a river near. But no kind of beast did I see, nor cows nor horses nor chickens, for they keep none. She takes me to her own lodge, where she lives by herself on account of her business, and gives me water to wash in and a bunch of feathers to dry myself, so that I was much refreshed.

  I had heard these Indians were mortal dragons, accustomed to eat the flesh of dead men, but the pretty little naked children playing with their dollies in the dust, oh! never could such little ducks be reared on cannibal meat! And my Indian ‘mother’, as I soon called her, assured me that though their cousins to the North roasted the thighs of their captives and ceremoniously partook thereof, it was, as you might say, a sacramental meal, to honour the departed by devouring him; and I have often disputed with the Minister on this point, that the Iroquois dinner is but the Mass in a state of nature. And the Minister will say, either: that I lived so long with Satan that I grew accustomed to his ways, or, that the Romish Mass is but the Iroquois feast in britches.

  As for me, all I ever eat among the Indians was fish, game or fowl, boiled or broiled, besides corn cooked in various ways, beans, squash in season and etc. and this such a healthy diet that it is very rare to see a sick body amongst them and never did I see there any either shaking with palsy or suffering toothache or with sore eyes or crooked with age.

  The weather being warm, at first I blushed to see the nakedness of the savages, for the men were accustomed to go clad in nowt but breech-clouts at that season and the women with only a rag about ’em. But soon I thought nothing of it and exchanged my petticoat for the bucksin one my mother give me and she gave me a necklace, too, of the beads they carve from shells, for she said she had no daughter of her own to pet until the woods sent her this one, whom she was thankful to the English for giving away.

  There was no end of the kindness of this woman to me and I lived in her cabin with her, for she had no husband, since she was, as it were the midwife of the tribe and all her time taken up with seeing to women in their labour. And it was to make potions to ease the labour pains and the pains of the women in their courses that she was picking herbs in the woods when I first saw her.

  How do they live, these so-called demi-devils? The men among them have an easy life, spend all their time in leisure and idleness, except when they are hunting or fighting their enemies, since all their tribes are constantly at war with one another, and with the English, too; and the werowance, as they call him, he is not the chief, or ruler of the village, although the English do say that he is so, but, rather, he is the man who goes the first in battle, so he is commonly more courageous a man than the English generals who direct their soldiers from the back.

  As for me, I stayed with my Indian mother in her hut and learned from her Indian manners, such as sitting on my knees on the ground to my meat that was spread on a mat before me because they have no furniture. I learned how to cure and dress robes out of buckskin, beaver and other skins, and to embroider them with shell and feather. I had a housewife with me in my apron pocket and my mother was very pleased with the steel needles, likewise with the tinder-box, which she was glad to get, while my carving-knife she thought a wonderfully convenient thing, they having no notion of working metal although the women make good pots out of the river clay and bake them in an open fire very cleverly while you never see a beard on any man, since they contrive to shave themselves all over quite close with razors of stone.

  And I should say that one or two guns they did have, for a little while before I arrived among ’em, there came a Scotsman, swapping guns and liquor in return for dressed robes and, as for the effects of the liquor, I shall say nowt about it except it sends ’em mad, but, as for the guns, they soon learned to use them.

  The harvest coming on, they gathered up their corn, a very poor, small sort of corn, to my way of thinking, the heads just that much bigger than my thumb, and we dug holes in the ground six or seven feet deep and what of the corn we did not eat we dried and stored away under the earth. But the digging was a great labour for they have no shovels or spades except what they steal from the English so we made shift with sticks or the shoulder-bones of deer. And if I have one quarrel with my tribe, it is that the men will have nothing to do with this agriculture, although it is heavy work, but go fishing in the creek or chase deer or engage in dances and such silly performances as they say will make the corn grow.

  But my mother said: ‘There is no harm in it and it keeps the men out of the way.’

  By the time the weather turned, I was rattling away in the Indian language as if I’d been born to it, though not a word of Hebrew did it contain so I think my old Lancashire lady was mistaken that they are the Lost Tribe of Israel and, as to converting them to the true religion, I was so busy with one thing and another that it never entered my head. As for my pale face, by the end of the harvest it was brown as any of theirs and my mother stained my light hair for me with some darkish dye so they grew accustomed to my presence among them and at six months end you would have thought she whom I called my ‘mother’ was my own natural mother and I was Indian born and bred, except my blue eyes remained a marvel.

  But for all the bonds of affection between us, I might still have thought of journeying on to Florida as the weather grew colder, such is the power of custom and habit, had I not cast my eye on a brave of that tribe who had no woman for himself and he cast his eye on me but never a word he says, it seems all along he intends to do the right thing by me, so it was my mother said to me at last: ‘That Tall Hickory you know of would like you for his wife.’ Tall Hickory being what his name signified in English, and as common a kind of name amongst ’em as James or Matthew might be in Lancashire.

  And now it comes to it, I wept, for he was a fine man.

  ‘How can I be that good man’s wife, mother, for I was a bad woman in my own country.’

  ‘A bad woman?’ she says. ‘What’s this?’

  So I told her what I did to earn my living on Cheapside; and how I was a thief by natural vocation. As for my whoring, she was very much surprised to
hear that English men would trouble to pay for such a thing as I had to sell, for the Indians exchange it free or not at all, and, as for my virginity being gone, she laughs and says: ‘If you were not good, nobody would have had you.’ But she grieves over my thievery until at last she says to me: ‘Well, child, would you steal away a bowl or wampun belt or robe from out of my hut and keep it yourself and deny it to me?’

  ‘How could I do that, mother,’ says I. ‘If I should need anything, I may use it and give it to you again as you do with our needles and the tinder-box and the knife. And so it is with such-a-one and such-a-one –’ naming our neighbours. ‘And to tell the truth, there is nowt in all the village excites my old passion of avarice, while as for my dinner, if I need it, I may have a share in any cooking pot in the Indian country, for that is the custom. So neither desire nor want can make a thief of me, here.’

  ‘Then you are a good woman in spite of yourself among the Indians and so I think you will remain,’ she says. ‘Why not marry the young fellow?’

  Now, certain men of the village, such as the general, and the priest, as I might call him, seeing he dealt with religion, had not one wife but three or four to till their fields for them and I did not like that. I would be the only one in my husband’s lodge, a fancy of the old life that I could not lose. And she puzzles over that, although she herself was never any man’s wife, having, so she tells me with a wink, not much liking for the sex and much fondness for her own.