Animal Appetite

the image of offended motherhood’s defense of a male child. The murdered child, however, was a baby girl.
    But back to the island, which was barely that: a few acres separated from the riverbank by marshy water and nowhere near the center of the confluence. The Merrimack and the Contoocook were dark, flat, and not half the width I’d imagined. The old iron railroad bridge didn’t even have to stretch hard to link land to island. As we followed the tracks across, Steve said, “The river would’ve been higher in March.”
    “Yes, but not all that much. In a pinch, you could swim across.”
    “Maybe not at that time of year. And they probably didn’t know how to swim.”
    “True. The river was in flood, I think. And if they’d gotten wet, they might’ve frozen to death.”
    I hadn’t known or maybe had forgotten that there was a monument on the island. I suppose I’d harbored some crazy expectation of crawling around in the moldy remains of a skin-covered tent or unearthing the skeleton of one of the birch-bark canoes that Hannah had scuttled before she fled. After three hundred years, needless to say, no trace remained. The abandoned tracks and a dirt path took us through a wooded area of hare-limbed maples and low evergreens to a big clearing.
    In the center of the clearing, near the river, rose a monument much taller than the one in Haverhill and far more funereal in appearance, a massive pillar of gray granite topped with a gray granite Hannah. She leaned forward in a way that reminded me of a figurehead on a ship. The bodice of her dress dipped low, and her arms were bare. Her left hand didn’t point in accusation, but rested at her hip. In it she clutched what could have been an upside-down bouquet of wilted flowers with round, flat blossoms.
    Scalps.
    Her right arm hung at her side. The hand had once held a hatchet. The blade remained. The handle was broken. Most of Hannah’s nose was missing.
    On the four sides of the pillar beneath this Hannah were rectangular slabs with rounded tops. The panels looked like tombstones. There were no pictures on them, just words. The one on the front started out in Latin and switched to English:
     
    HEROUM GESTA
    FIDES JUSTITIA
    HANNAH DUSTON
    MARY NEFF
    SAMUEL LEONARDSON
    MARCH 30, 1697
    MID-NIGHT
     
    “Something about fidelity and justice?” I said to Steve. “Heroism?”
    He shrugged.
    On the tombstone under Hannah’s right side was carved donors. Beneath was a list of names. Under Hannah’s left arm and the scalps was what was evidently intended as poetry. It was all in capital letters and had no punctuation.
     
    STATUA
    KNOW YE THAT WE WITH MANY PLANT IT
    IN TRUST TO THE STATE WE GIVE & GRANT IT
    THAT THE TIDE OF TIME MAY NEVER CANT IT
    NOR MAR NOR SEVER
    THAT PILGRIM HERE MAY HEED THE MOTHERS
    THAT TRUTH & FAITH & ALL THE OTHERS
    WITH BANNERS HIGH IN GLORIOUS COLORS
    MAY STAND FOREVER
     
    At the bottom were five more names.
    “ ‘Glorious colors’?” I said. “It’s totally gray.”
    “Doesn’t mean a thing to me,” Steve said.
    But the really weird inscription appeared on the back of the pillar, and before I present it, let me comment that there’s nothing like real weirdness to heal a troubled relationship, so if you, too, ever find that the harmony between you and your lover has been marred, severed, or otherwise disrupted by mothers, fathers, national holidays, car sickness, or anything else, take a visit to Boscawen, New Hampshire, make your way around to the back of Hannah’s statue, and read, just as we did:
     
    MARCH
    15  1697  30
    THE WAR WHOOP TOMAHAWK
    FAGGOT & INFANTICIDES
    WERE AT HAVERHILL
    THE ASHES OF WIGWAM-CAMP-FIRES AT NIGHT
    & OF TEN OF THE TRIBE
    ARE HERE
     
    I subsequently learned that on June 17, 1874, the day this monument was unveiled, between three thousand and six thousand people attended the ceremony, which was cut short by heavy rain. The reporter for the Concord Monitor who described the aborted festivities complained in print that the monument was “disfigured with some doggerel and other evidence of bad taste.”
    Steve and I gaped. I read the inscription aloud.
    “It isn’t English,” he said.
    “But ‘faggot’?”
    “Bunches of sticks. Firewood. Death by fire. They burned people alive.”
    “Not here. But I can’t think what else it could mean. ‘Infanticides’ means her baby, I guess. Martha, her name was. But the rest? It’s amazing that she isn’t missing more than her nose and the