The Holder of the World by Bharati Mukherjee Read Free Book Online

assiduously in dim light from whale oil. Too assiduously, Susannah feared. Even diligence should not be indulged, lest it lead to pride of excess.
    “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,” she admonished.
    “Ecclesiastes, nine-eleven,” said Hannah, not looking up.
    She tried to correct the deformation of love. She brought The Bay Psalm Book to Thomas where he sat by the window in a mobile chair he had ingeniously constructed and had him locate a verse her needle could commemorate. Thomas could read and write as Susannah could not, and it was to Thomas that Hannah’s education was wholly entrusted.
    Thomas chose the most popular:
Aske thou of me, and I will give the Heathen for thy lot; and of the earth thou shalt possess the utmost coasts abroad .
    He whomped The Bay Psalm Book shut so hard that a tong fell off its hook by the fireplace. Was Thomas, too, troubled by the ambiguities of providential messages? Did he, legless woodworker, feel bitter that “utmost coasts” were no longer possible for him to possess?
    An uneasy memory stalled Hannah’s hand as she reached for threads from the workbasket. Another window. Another psalm-sayer. Rebecca sang with sweet confidence.
    Hannah sang from the compulsion of memory.
Desire of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance; and the utmost parts of the earth for thy possession .
    Rebecca had sung from Psalms 2:8; Thomas recited from The Bay Psalm Book of 1640. Aske thou of me. Desire of me . Ask or desire—what’s the difference, anyway? Except. Except that “ask” suggests aggression and self-righteousness. It seems like a clash of the sexes, a triumph of pioneer virility.
     … heathen for thine inheritance. Heathen for thy lot .
    Did Philip’s Wampanoag warriors and Rebecca’s Nipmuc lover suffer as they went from being “inheritance” to “lot” in Puritan vocabulary?
    The verse emblazoned itself in colors so tropical that the threads Hannah used had to have been brought over from a mysterious place with a musical name: Bandar Abbas, Batavia, Bimlipatam. The result is, for me, one of the great colonial samplers (though she was not sewing it to prove her marriageability), far smaller than the usual quilt, not much larger than a bandanna.
    On a field of light blue, Hannah created an “uttermost shore.” A twelve-year-old Puritan orphan who had never been out of Massachusetts imagined an ocean, palm trees, thatched cottages, and black-skinned men casting nets and colorfully garbed bare-breasted women mending them; native barks and, on the horizon, high-masted schooners. Colonial gentlemen in breeches and ruffled lace, buckled hats and long black coats pacing the shore. In the distance, through bright-green foliage, a ghostly white building—it could even be the Taj Mahal—is rising.
    “The Utmost Parts” (Anonymous, Salem c. 1680) sold to an anonymous buyer on the open market at Sotheby’s (Tokyo), in 1983 for $6,000 . Besides me, only one person in the world knows the names of both Anonymouses.
    That little embroidery is the embodiment of desire. The full verse from Psalms is scrolled beneath the vision—for surely that is what it is: a pure vision. It is the first native American response to a world that could be African or Indian or anything not American. It employs the same economy, the same apparently naive sophistication as the Mughal paintings that would later feature her.
    Thomas framed her handiwork in the finest cherrywood left over from a chest he had made for the fearsome old magistrate, the twisted John Hathorne (whose excesses in the witch trials would so torment his descendant, Nathaniel Hawthorne). He heaved himself as high as he could in his mobile chair and hammered the heavy object low into the wall behind her bed. The rainbow banner glowed, a genie’s lamp, in a cold, narrow room. And at bedtimes when she knelt by it to pray, it shot the familiar virtues she prayed for—humility, gratitude,