My mind raced like a shuttle flying through the warp, seeing designs on the future. “I will save back enough for my passage and a little more, if all else fails. I will write and hope for word from my brother. I will spend what I must to keep myself.”
A smile spread upon her face as if a sun rose in her eyes. She dropped the fog of ale and madness. “That’s my girl. Let us work, now.”
We set about making out notices—just two—one we would place on the town board here in Boston, one to be nailed on a post set near the crossroads in Lexington. We walked to the craftsmen’s road, a bustling place, noisy with the sounds of men’s work: anvils clanging, a wooden board falling and someone cursing it, the rumble of a sawmill. Goody lifted her nose and smelled the air. “Would you know a dyer’s if you smelled it?”
We asked at the woodsman’s shop if any knew of a thatcher. The thatcher was working so we left word with his wife, so large with child she looked round as a fish barrel. She knew a woolery where we might find wheels. I bought all the wool hanks they had—filling two bushels, plus two bushels of well-hackled linen. I purchased a flax wheel, and we took the small parts in a crate, the rest we had to carry. Goody and I lugged the bushel baskets, the crate, and the wheel. After we had walked three miles, a young man came upon us from behind. He offered to carry the load for us, and at last added, “I’m plenty strong. Your grandmother is old,” said he. “She is weary from carrying this load.”
“No,” I said. “For you could as well take my goods and run into the woods, and we could not chase you without losing the rest of it.”
“Go on with you,” Goody Carnegie said. “You heard the lass. We need no help.” When he had gone, she asked, “Why did you turn him away? I am sore tired, carrying these.”
“He asked for nothing in return. If he had said, ‘Give me three farthings to help you get your load to town,’ I would have believed he simply wanted the farthings. No. I believe he wanted to steal from us.”
“You will get along, I see. There’s the girl.”
With luck, two boys came alongside us, carrying between them a loose basket with two squawking geese inside. “Pleasant day, misses,” one boy said. He had a missing tooth in front, and half the other greatest tooth was eaten away with decay. “I’ll take half your load for a shilling. My brother can carry our ma’s geese.” We let him carry the wheel and two bushels, so we had the crate and a bushel to trade between us. The boy left the wheel at Goody’s door, too, not shirking the last steps. I gave him the shilling and Goody gave him an apple.
In a week I had turned the wool and flax to thread, and carried them back to town in one of the baskets. I sold them to the woolery and bought as much as my three baskets could carry plus another basket. I did this for two more weeks, and by the second week of July I had a purse of nearly five pounds. After two more weeks, I asked at the woolery for a loom maker. I was sent back two streets near another wood shop.
The loom maker, who insisted he not be called “sir,” or any salutation other than Barnabus, was a wizened creature who wore a long robe like the priests I had known. His shop was a muddle of pieces, jumbled and confused bits of wire, tools on the floor and on tables, burned-out tapers having waxed everything to the tabletops. Little light came through the blackened windows and balls of some kind of animal hair drifted about the floor. “My wife of thirty years has died. These three days has she lain in her grave. I can do nothing. Nothing. Please go away.”
Goody said, “Had she been sick a long spell, Barnabus?”
“A year to the day she died. One year. I have done nothing, all these many months. I’m no weaver. Now if you will leave an old man to his grief? Go down the street to Vicksley’s. He’s no good but he needs the work. He’s got fourteen or fifteen children. Maybe eighteen. Who counts?”
Goody Carnegie looked the more sad and said, “And you have none? Oh, you poor man. Poor man.”