Animal Appetite

I’d read at the Newton Free Library, housed tedious exhibits in a shabby old building. To my eye, the museum, Buttonwoods, showed none of the disrepair I’d expected. A modern wing blended smoothly into a handsome old colonial house. The entrance hall was a bright, cheerful room with freshly painted white walls and attractive displays about the Native Americans who’d inhabited what later became Haverhill. So much for trusting the printed word.
    The Yankee article had made the museum guides sound bored and unhelpful. It seemed to me that they tried their best to assist me despite overwhelmingly adverse circumstances, specifically, two thousand drippynosed schoolchildren. Actually, there were only forty or fifty kids, but their noses exuded the nasal discharge of a multitude, and when they opened their mouths to cough, the historic house resembled a gigantic nest of greedy baby birds. Insinuating myself into the group, I piped up to ask about the tribe or clan who’d captured Hannah Duston. Before the guide could answer, a teacher accosted me to explain that the Hannah Duston part came later. And which school was I from, anyway?
    Eventually, when the competition among the hackers and drippers had reached a virulent fever pitch, the guide led us into an exhibition hall in the old part of the museum and showed us, among zillions of other objects displayed on the walls and in glass cases, the Hannah Duston artifacts. The Yankee article had suggested that the Duston items were few, dull, and of doubtful provenance: a teapot, some buttons, and what were believed to be the hatchet and the scalping knife that Hannah Duston had used on her abductors.
    The artifact I’d come to see, Hannah’s “Confession of Faith,” was framed in glass. Until 1929, the document had rested, unrecognized for what it was, in the Haverhill Center Congregational Church. One account claimed that it lay in a vault; another, that it was discovered behind a gallery pew. Since it was of no interest to the children, I had the chance to study it. “I am Thankful for my Captivity,” Hannah had professed; “ ’twas the Comfortablest time that ever I had: In my Affliction God made his Word Comfortable to me.” In one of the books I’d consulted, I’d seen an old document that Hannah Duston had signed only with a scrawled X. I wondered whether she’d dictated this statement or learned to write at an advanced age. She’d made the “Confession of Faith” at the age of sixty-seven, when she finally applied for full church membership: “I desire the Church to receive me tho’ it be at the Eleventh hour.” I later read somewhere that she’d dictated the confession to her minister. At the time of her captivity, she’d been almost forty. After her return, she and Thomas had yet another baby, a girl, Lydia. Hannah and Thomas Duston were buried in an old cemetery in Haverhill. The graves hadn’t been marked, the guide said, because of the fear that Indians would steal the bodies. The age of sixty-seven was not, after all, Hannah Duston’s eleventh hour. She was born in 1657 and lived for nearly eighty years. Only the good die young?
    When the tour ended, I asked the guide whether the historical society owned a copy of And One Fought Back. Like the man at the library, she got her hackles up. The guide, however, knew an honest face when she saw one. The volume, she informed me, had been stolen. Its author, Lewis Clark, I learned, had taught at Haverhill High School, written the biography in the thirties, and perished in the Battle of the Bulge. No, the guide said, his widow had died years ago. They’d had no Children.
    The museum, too, was finally childless, so I poked around examining a lot of objects that the Yankee article hadn’t mentioned and acquiring bits of information I’d missed elsewhere. The boy captive, Samuel, had been stolen in 1695 at the age of twelve; at the time of the massacre, he’d been fourteen, old enough to swing a hatchet. And speaking of hatchets, the blade of the one on display looked as dull as the purported scalping knife. The knife was worn and chipped; it had no sharp edge at all. Could Hannah possibly have brought it home and gone on using it to slaughter pigs and peel vegetables? Or had she dulled and nicked it in a single night?
    In mint condition were a collection of pewter plates presented to Hannah by Governor Sir Francis Nicholson of Maryland and a large pewter tankard offered as a tribute by the