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| Pink Lady's Slipper, found in Bristol, Vermont (Cypripedium acaule) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
The mid-afternoon sun was warm on her shoulders as she crouched low at the fields edge, pinching with slender fingers the delicately rare pink and white flower from its thick milky stem. She then gently rested the lady-slipper in the basket hanging from the crook of her arm now evenly tanned.
Timeless granite field-stones, scaled in dry green-gray lichen and glimmering silver from mica embedded within, rested defiantly amidst the brittle brown topped August grasses while bees hurriedly skipped about drawing pollen from the last of the seasons goldenrod.
The walk home from Sunday Service was her private moment of ritual silent solace, where, in this small fallow field, a mere clearing in an endless woods, she was as close as she would ever be to returning to the civility of an English garden. Here, in this natural pocket of light surrounded by darkness and cold, she found escape from the constant struggle of wilderness living and its unceasing demand for strength and perseverance.
Here, she could forget that she was truly alone.
But Deborah couldnt completely free herself from the demanding responsibilities of motherhood even in her maturing years. Matthew had become endlessly distraught by the anxious ghosts of sleeplessness, so she had set upon herself this day a mother's mission to brew a potent elixir of Lady Slipper, Skullcap, and Catnip to bring the once happy and inquisitive boy back to her.
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He had to stop.
The insistent pain was becoming undeniable, so he placed his hand upon the gray-skinned poplar tree to brace himself as he slowly eased his body down upon the boulder to rest. Montowampate, not without his permanent scars, needed to tend to his still tender right knee.
A light breeze passed through the small poplar grove with a reassuring sigh, carrying with it a familiar but unwelcome scent of a nearby Englishman. He abruptly pulled his focus from the warming rub of his knee and lifted his eyes to the clearing a hundred paces ahead. On the sunny far side of the field beyond the growing shadows, he detected an unexpected movement partly concealed by scraggly random alders and tall grass; an inattentive white woman. Montowampate admired her elegant motions so uncharacteristic of the brutish Europeans. She was neither frail nor powerful, but refreshingly healthy in an environment so obviously foreign to her and mercilessly unforgiving to her people.
Popularly known as Sagamore James by the English, twenty-three year old Montowampate cautiously watched the white woman nearly twice his age as he recommitted his efforts to tending the knee severely injured the summer before while defending the remains of his dwindling agrarian Masachuset people from the aggressive Tarratine marauders of the north. He had been appointed by his mother, the Squaw Sachem, widow of assassinated Nanepashemet, as Chief of the Saugus tribe, a people already partially displaced from their traditional home along the salt-marshes of the Abousett estuaries by the sudden influx of Europeans. Together, with his brother, Wonohaquaham, Sachem of Mishawum and Winnisimmet, they were struggling to preserve the once great and peaceful nation of tens of thousands now winnowed and weakened by war and disease in a generation's time to a mere couple hundred people .
The sun tucked behind a passing cumulus cloud. Grass, goldenrod and mature milkweed rolled in the rejuvenated breeze, bursting forth heavy pollen into the air. A crow, once safe with its secluded meal of ripened choke cherries, cried its loud repeated "nyuh unh" as it lept into flight over the open field, startled. It circled above the crouched white woman as she watched overhead with childish innocence and then passed to the north, but an unfamiliar heaviness fell upon Montowampate as he traced its flight over the canopy of pine to a faraway place of unseen silence. He finished rubbing warmth into his knee, re-wrapped it with the soiled brown cloth for support and pulled down the leg of his ill-fitting gray woolen breeches. He found his taut muscles ached of a tired spirit and realized now that the pace in which his young life raced through the cycle of seasons was taking its toll.
The Saugus Sachem watched Deborah stand up and press her dress neat, tidy her head covering and grab her basket. She then quietly slipped back into the woods to complete her short Sunday trek home to her waiting sons. He punctuated the moment with the slow release of a long drawn breath, then grabbed his seasoned willow walking stick and passed behind the brush cover that had stood between them. He unceremoniously renewed his journey to Charlestown where he would powwow early the next day with his elder brother, Wonohaquaham, who had just returned from a call to battle to the south in support of the Canonicus-led Narragansetts' skirmish with the Wampanaugs.
