“Not much.” Marcus looked surprised that I was interested in such a thing. “The door was red. There was a lilac bush outside, and the scent came through the open windows in May. The more my mother neglected it, the more it bloomed. And there was a black clock on the mantel. In the parlor. It came down to her through the Chauncey family, and she wouldn’t let anyone touch it.”
As Marcus recalled small details of his past, his memory—which had grown rusty and sepia toned from disuse—began to operate more freely.
“There were geese everywhere in Hadley,” Marcus continued. “They were vicious, and roamed all over town frightening the children. And I remember there was a brass rooster atop the meetinghouse steeple. Zeb put it up there. God, I haven’t thought about that rooster in ages.”
“Zeb?” I asked, less interested in the town’s weather vane.
“Zeb Pruitt. My friend. My hero, really,” Marcus said slowly.
Time chimed in warning, the sound echoing in my ears.
“What’s your earliest memory of him?” I prompted Marcus.
“He taught me how to march like a soldier,” Marcus whispered. “In the barn. I was five or six. My father caught him. He didn’t let me spend much time with Zeb after that.”
A red door.
A lilac bush.
A wayward flock of geese.
A rooster on the meetinghouse steeple.
A friend who played make-believe soldier with him.
These charming fragments were part of the larger mosaic of Marcus’s life, but they weren’t enough to form a coherent picture of his past, or reveal some larger historical truth.
I opened my mouth to ask another question. Matthew shook his head, warning me not to interfere in the story but to let Marcus take it in whatever direction he needed to go.
“My father was a soldier. He was in the militia, and fought at Ft. William Henry. He didn’t see me for months after I was born,” Marcus said, his voice dropping. “I always wondered whether things would have been different if only he had come home sooner from the war, or never gone at all.”
Marcus shivered and I felt a flicker of unease.
“War changed him. It changes everybody, of course. But my father believed in God and country first, and rules and discipline second.” Marcus cocked his head to the side as if he were considering a proposition. “I suppose that’s one of the reasons why I don’t have much faith in rules. They don’t always keep you safe, like my father believed.”
“Your father sounds like he was a man of his time,” I noted. Rules and regulations were a fixture of early American life.
“If you mean he sounds like a patriarch, you’d be right,” Marcus agreed. “Full of bristle and brimstone, with the Lord and the king on his side no matter what daft position he adopted. Obadiah MacNeil ruled over our house and everybody in it. It was his kingdom.”
Marcus’s blue eyes shattered under the weight of his recollections.
“We had this bootjack,” Marcus continued. “It was made out of iron and shaped like a devil. You put your heel between the horns, stepped on the devil’s heart, and pulled your leg free of the boot. And when my father picked up that bootjack, even the cat knew it was time to disappear.”
Words of one Syllable
THE NEW ENGLAND PRIMER, 1762
Age
all
ape
are
Babe
beef
best
bold
Cat
cake
crown
cup
Deaf
dead
dry
dull
Eat
ear
eggs
eyes
Face
feet
fish
fowl
Gate
good
grass
great
Hand
hat
head
heart
Ice
ink
isle
job
Kick
kind
kneel
know
Lamb
lame
land
long
Made
mole
moon
mouth
Name
night
noise
noon
Oak
once
one
ounce
Pain
pair
pence
pound
Quart
queen
quick
quilt
Rain
raise
rose
run
Saint
sage
salt
said
Take
talk
time
throat
Vaine
vice
vile
view
Way
wait
waste
would
6
Time
MARCH 1762
The black clock on the polished mantel struck noon, marking the passage of the hours. It stood out against the whitewashed walls of the parlor, the only ornament in the room. The family Bible and the almanac his father used to note down important events and the changing weather were propped up next to it.
Its piercing chime was one of the familiar sounds of home: his mother’s soft voice, the geese that honked in the road, his baby sister’s babble.
The clock whirred into silence, waiting for its next opportunity to perform.
“When is Pa coming back?” Marcus asked, looking up from his primer. His father hadn’t been there to preside over breakfast. He must be very hungry, thought Marcus, after missing his meal of porridge, eggs, bacon, bread, and jam. Marcus’s stomach grumbled in sympathy, and he wondered whether they would have to wait for Pa to return before eating their midday meal.
“When he’s finished.” His mother’s tone was unusually sharp, her face set in lines of worry under a starched linen cap. “Come, read me the next word.”
“N-ame.” Marcus slowly sounded out the letters. “My name is Marcus MacNeil.”
“Yes, it is,” his mother replied. “And the next word?”
“Ni-jit.” Marcus frowned. That wasn’t a word he’d heard before. “Ni-got?”
“Do you remember what I told you about silent letters?” His mother lifted Patience from the wide-planked floor and went to the window, her brown skirts swishing. As she walked, sand came up through the cracks between the boards.
Marcus did remember—dimly.
“Night.” Marcus looked up. “That’s when Father left. It was raining. And dark.”
“Can you find the word ‘rain’ in your book?” His mother peered out from among the spaces in the shutters. She dusted them every day, sliding a goose feather through each narrow opening. Marcus’s mother was particular about such things and allowed no one else to take care of the front room—not even old Ellie Pruitt, who came one morning a week to help with the other chores.
“Oak. Pain. Quart. Rain. I found it, Mama!” Marcus shouted with excitement.
“Good boy. One day you will be a scholar at Harvard, like the other men in the Chauncey family.” His mother was inordinately proud of her cousins, uncles, and brothers, all of whom had gone to school for years and years. To Marcus, the prospect sounded drearier than the weather.
“No. I’m going to be a soldier, like Pa.” Marcus kicked at the legs of his chair, a sign of his commitment to this course of action. It made such a satisfying sound that he did it again.
“Stop this nonsense. What is a foolish son?” His mother jiggled Patience up and down on her hip. Patience was teething, which made her fractious and soggy.
“A heaviness to his mother,” Marcus said, turning to the page of alphabet verses. There was the proverb—right at the top: A wise son maketh a glad father, but a foolish son is a heaviness to his mother. His mother was always pointing it out to him.
“Recite the rest of the alphabet,” his mother instructed, walking the edges of the room to keep Patience’s mind off her discomfort. “And no mumbling. They don’t allow boys to attend Harvard College if they mumble.”
Marcus reached L—Liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, his mother intoned when he had trouble reading out the words—when the wooden gate that protected their front garden from the geese and the traffic opened. His mother froze.