Animal Appetite

followed by the presence of a person at the door signals a UPS driver bearing an edible treat.
    As usual, the dogs were right. Except this time the UPS package wasn’t from Cherrybrook and didn’t contain anything to eat, unless you count paper, which Rowdy and Kimi prefer when it’s spiced with a condiment such as the glue in the spines of books and on the flaps of envelopes. In extremis, the dogs will, however, devour paper unseasoned, especially if it bears the scent of other people’s dogs, as does almost all my mail, of course, including the large padded mailing envelope that had just arrived. It came from Janet Switzer and contained a photocopy of the privately printed book about Hannah Duston. Janet had promised to look for it. She’d come through.
    “And One Fought Back!" I exclaimed. “Really, Rita, you know that old saw—‘If you want something done, ask a busy person’? What it really ought to be is, ‘If you want something done, ask a dog person.’ ”
    Muttering about violations of copyright law, Rita emptied her mug in the sink and left for her office. After brewing a cup of strong coffee, I settled myself at the kitchen table and eagerly prepared to learn the full, true story of Hannah Duston, including what I hoped would be a wealth of detail about the parents who had produced Hannah and her baby-murdering sister, Elizabeth Emerson.
    According to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s book, Good Wives, contemporaries of Hannah and Elizabeth had had no interest in exactly what grabbed me: the streak of violence the two sisters shared. Rather, Elizabeth had been a condemned murderer, a sinner, whereas Hannah had been a shining symbol of God’s sustenance in the wilderness, a heroine. What accounted for Hannah’s guts—my word, of course, not the scholar’s—applied to hundreds of men and women who’d passively endured Indian captivity until they were “redeemed”—ransomed for goods or traded for hostages—or who, like Eunice Williams, had become permanent members of Indian communities through adoption or marriage. Hannah Duston wasn’t the only woman who’d slaughtered pigs; virtually everyone had. Other women had stood up to their neighbors and served as what Ulrich called “deputy husbands.” Furthermore, plenty of unmarried women undoubtedly had had babies without promptly committing infanticide. Elizabeth Emerson herself had already been an unmarried mother when she’d given birth to the twins she killed. According to Ulrich, the colonists hadn’t seen any connection between the two acts of violence, hadn’t even viewed them as such, hadn’t sought a pattern handed down from parents to children in the Emerson family, hadn’t suspected the lurking presence of a sinister family secret.
    But I did! Among other things, although Hannah had supposedly been inspired by God to deliver herself, Mary Neff, and the boy Samuel from the clutches of the so-called savages, she’d not only scalped ten human beings, but had waited twenty-two years after doing so before finally becoming a full member of her church. In 1697, when Cotton Mather preached a sermon lauding Hannah Duston as the defender of Zion, he also took her to task: “You continue Unhumbled in Your sins,” he’d said. Hannah had been baptized as a child. Not until 1724, when at the age of sixty-seven she dictated the “Confession” I’d read at the Haverhill Historical Society, did she offer the proof of conversion needed for full membership in the church. I had no illusion that in chastising Hannah Duston, Cotton Mather had shared my doubts about the goodness of her character or harbored my suspicions about her family. Even so, I wondered whether in squeezing her into the mold of New England’s heroine, Mather, who’d heard Hannah’s tale firsthand, hadn’t found her a tight fit.
    What I hoped for in the obscure old book, And One Fought Back, was not a Rita-style analysis of the dynamics of a radically dysfunctional family, nor did I expect from the author, Lewis Clark, the kind of conclusion that Oscar Fisch would probably have reached: that if Hannah and Elizabeth had only joined the recovery movement and found solidarity with other survivors of parental abuse, Hannah would’ve ended up waiting to be traded for a hostage or contracted a bigamous marriage with one of her captors, and Elizabeth would’ve spared the babies and founded a proto-support group for unwed mothers. All I wanted was additional confirmation