Animal Appetite

misunderstanding.”
    Still on his knees, he groaned, “More!”
    “You are making a fool of yourself,” I said gently. “Yes!” he sighed.
    I spoke very calmly. “There has been a profound misunderstanding here. I have been very naive. I thought you meant your dissertation on Hannah Duston.” Almost whispering, I told him that the best thing would be if he’d stand up and leave. “And take these, uh, things with you,” I added. “They are of no interest to me at all.”
    I turned my back on him. Still carrying the ax, I walked to the gate, opened it, and left him alone in the yard. Then I went into the house. Peering through the blinds of my study, I watched him make his dejected roly-poly way down the drive.
    My talk about myself as the alpha leader. My ax, my leather boots, my prominent display of leashes. My big, tough dogs. Combined with my interest in Hannah Dus-ton? Carey had seen me as the modern-day Hannah: the ultimate dominatrix.
     

Thirty

     
    I tried to extend to Randall Carey my fragile view of Hannah Duston, Mary Neff, Samuel Leonardson, and their Indian captors as desperate people in circumstances too desperate for me to understand. I had never had a child, never mind stood helplessly by as armed men grabbed my six-day-old baby girl and crushed her head against a tree. Hannah and her companions had not had the benefit of the books I’d consulted. Hannah hadn’t even known how to read. When she’d finally acted on what she’d called “a great Desire to come to the Ordinance of the Lords Supper,” she’d dictated those words and her entire “Confession of Faith” to her minister. I knew that Thomas had rescued the Duston children left behind. Until her return, Hannah did not. If I, too, had believed that the bondage would culminate when, still recuperating from childbirth, I was stripped naked and forced to run the gauntlet, what would I have done?
    Of the circumstances of her captors, I knew so little that I had only an educated guess about their tribe: Abenaki. I knew who Hannah’s captors were not: the original inhabitants of the area that became Haverhill, whose stone axes were displayed at Buttonwoods, where, in my pursuit of the Duston artifacts, I’d barely glanced at drawings of dugout canoes that had carried men, women, and children soon exterminated by a “great plague,” as it was called, a European disease, smallpox, perhaps, or the plague itself. Three hundred years after Hannah’s violent escape, the rage of today’s Native Americans was scrawled in new graffiti on her statue in Haverhill. Yet Hannah’s captors, survivors themselves, had adopted the young Samuel Leonardson; they had not held his fair skin against him, but had eagerly sought human beings, regardless of origin, to replenish their own vastly diminished numbers.
    In trying to imagine myself the hostage of impulses like Randall Carey’s, I failed completely. His urge felt as distant as the three centuries that separated me from Hannah and her captors alike, as deeply beyond me as the murder of a newborn infant or the slaying and scalping of child victims, as outlandish as the Native Americans and the English colonists had seemed to one another. For the grisly acts committed by both sides, I could recite explanations I’d read: In immediately killing their captives, Indians had dispatched the young, the old, and the infirm, those who wouldn’t survive the trek to French territory. The prisoners had had practical value as replacements in families destroyed by dislocation, starvation, and disease; monetary value as goods to be traded for the necessities of survival; political value as barter for French hostages held by the English colonials; and psychological value in a war of fear. In returning to the bloodied wigwam to scalp her victims, Hannah, too, had had practical motives. She’d been convinced that in the absence of irrefutable proof, no one would believe what she and Mary and Samuel had done. She’d hoped for money. She’d received it.
    Randall Carey, in contrast, had attempted nothing grisly. The ax had remained in my hand. He had humiliated me; I’d felt like a fool. Dear God! What, if anything, was I going to say to Cecily? The whole scene, however, had been utterly unlike my silly fantasy of poisoned latte.
    Feeling sullied by the episode, I took a long hot shower. Letting the water run through my hair, I reminded myself that I was blameless. It wasn’t as if I’d paraded around