Animal Appetite

that as music ran in the Bach family, as dogs ran in mine, so violence ran in Hannah and Elizabeth’s.
    In the book, I found facts I’d read elsewhere: Hannah was almost forty years old when taken captive. By then, she’d borne twelve children. The oldest, a daughter of about eighteen, was also named Hannah. A son, Timothy, was two and a half. After Hannah’s release, she and her husband, Thomas, had a thirteenth child. Her parents were Hannah and Michael Emerson. She was their oldest daughter.
    I encountered a few oddities and discrepancies that had now become familiar to me. Was the newborn Martha Duston included in the count of Hannah and Thomas’s children? According to Clark, she was. When the assailants slew the baby, did they smash her head against a tree, as most accounts claimed, or, as a few said, against a rock? A rock, Clark said. Some inconsistencies I’d learned to ignore. Duston, as Clark explained, was variously spelled Dustin and Dustan; inconsistent spelling, it seems, was common in that day. As Clark realized, Cotton Mather had inadvertently misled generations of scholars by giving the date of the massacre and scalping as April 30; Mather had meant March. The boy captive who joined Hannah and Mary Neff in the killing was Samuel Leonardson, Lennardson, or Lenorson; Clark used Lenorson.
    As to facts, I learned nothing new. Like his predecessors, Lewis Clark had missed the connection that Laura Thatcher Ulrich had made in her book: He clearly hadn’t known that Hannah and Elizabeth were sisters. I felt disappointed. Elizabeth had identified the father of Dorothie, her first child, as a man named Timothy Swan. She’d brazenly called the baby after his mother. So far as I knew, she hadn’t named the father of her twins, but had denied her second pregnancy and, when charged with infanticide, utterly denied her guilt: “I never murdered any child in my life,” she’d testified. Clark, however, didn’t even mention Elizabeth.
    Like me, Clark had tried and failed to discover the name of the tribe or clan that had captured Hannah. What surprised me was both the thoroughness of the scholarly account and the engaging style of the writing. Lewis Clark cited his sources. Better yet, like Good Wives and like The Unredeemed Captive, his little privately printed account brought life to Hannah’s era. Of Thomas Duston’s decision to save his older children instead of his wife and baby, Clark wrote with neither Dwight’s undisguised admiration nor my own skepticism. Hannah herself emerged as neither heroine nor fiend. From the little book, I learned no facts. From Lewis Clark, who died in the Battle of the Bulge, I learned a lesson in shunning moral judgment.
     

Twenty-Seven

     
    That same Thursday evening at dog training, instead of emptying my mind of worldly thoughts to contemplate the Infinite in Kimi’s deep brown eyes, I found myself preoccupied with violence. Not that I practiced it! Not since my most recent religious conversion, which took place at a revival-tent obedience seminar led by Patty Ruzzo, who preached the gospel of the ears-up, eyes-bright, correction-free method so passionately that I was vaguely disappointed when Patty didn’t ask us to approach the high jump, cast off our dogs’ choke collars, and vow to go forth and jerk no more. Even without actually impelling me to speak in tongues, Patty got across the Good News that I could train with nothing but positive reinforcement and really didn’t have to hurt my dogs.
    I suspect that all converts have the same experience I did: Doing good proved comparatively easy. The hard part was not sinning. I’d been training with food and smiles for years; I had no trouble dishing out yet more treats and sweet talk. The malingerers were my left wrist and my big mouth. All on its own, my hand would jerk the collar, or I’d say something negative. Then I’d beg Kimi not to tell Patty.
    Because of my current preoccupation with violence, dog training that night was a little less relaxing than usual. Also, I felt guilty about Rowdy, who knew that Kimi had gone with me to have fun while he’d been left out. Consequently, when Kimi and I got home, I fought my fatigue and set out for a little compensatory walk with Rowdy. To avoid offering him false hope, I decided not to take Concord Avenue toward the armory, where the Cambridge Dog Training Club meets, but followed Appleton to Huron and turned left.
    The night was bitterly cold and dry,