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

about Hannah. He knows I know about Hannah. He’s discovered the Salem Bibi. He knows the fingers that did the embroidery have also touched the Emperor’s Tear.

7
    OVER THE YEARS Susannah Fitch passed on to Hannah all the conventional wisdom and housekeeping tips she herself had needed to make for Robert an agreeable bride and efficient helpmeet, and the one new skill—the sewing and healing of scalped heads—that she had taught herself since that frightful siege of Brookfield.
    This was different from nursing. All frontier wives and mothers know that knowledge of nursing is more valuable than cooking and cleaning. There are always fights or accidents with axes, drownings in streams with slippery banks, fevers that maim the mind as well as limbs. One child in five might grow up. But when King Philip’s War heaped Indian rage quite literally on colonists’ heads, Susannah had the opportunity to improve upon the scalp-healing technique of the very aged Goodwife Brooks of Woburn.
    Susannah adapted a technique she’d learned from a horse doctor. When hunting and guard dogs got into fights with raccoons, bears and wolverines, those that survived often required emergency surgery. And when the wounds were too deep, or too broad, the doctor often snipped off pieces of skin from smaller cuts and sewed them as bridges across the injury. He considered regenerative processes limited to the lower animals, the way lizards and frogs grew back their lost limbs. But Susannah experimented with the men of Brookfield and found, more often than not, the bridge became permanent; the bone was covered; the horrible puckering was reduced. She found that perfectly good strips of skin could be cut from the back of an unconscious man and sewn in bands across the scalp. If he survived the scalping, he’d certainly live through the harvesting from his back and ribs.
    And Hannah, though squeamish at the sight of blood drawn righteously through public whippings outside the meeting hall, took enthusiastically to assisting in Susannah’s sealings-up. Nursing, she still abhorred. Washing and bandaging wounds, cleaning up pus and vomit, all this she found too passive, too mundane. In rare moods, she remembered how much fun Rebecca had made their trips into the forest in order to pick herbs, scrape barks, squeeze or boil medicinal secretions of insects. But in the Fitch house, Rebecca’s remedies would have been condemned as shameful witchery owing far too much to nighttime aboriginal conjurings (how would any decent white woman learn such things, test them, and trust them? And as always, Hannah had her terrible secret to bear).
    Surgery, however, was respectable, especially when each success and each failure were ascribed to the glory or mysterious purposiveness of God. Hannah, cursed or blessed with too much intensity, improvised daring techniques on stray cats and slow squirrels, so that by the time she was fourteen she covertly but regularly practiced on small animals, first skinning their heads with speed and care as she had seen the Nipmuc women do, then stitching the flaps of skin to the raw, shiny flesh.
    Her apprenticeship is chronicled obliquely. A 1685 diary entry of Providence Silsbee refers to a large and surprising plague of bald rodents in Salem. (Memories of this peculiar plague would figure later in witchcraft trials.) Silsbee had ascribed the damage to high-spirited boys, but he did remark on the brightly colored threads used to stitch the skin, the whimsical patterns that made squirrels at a distance look like recipients of gaily colored skullcaps.
    Later she would make her way to a smaller subcontinent with a vaster wilderness and meet a fugitive Venetian surgeon or quack fleeing an emperor in a Capuchin’s robes and learn from him one hundred and one ways to fix dented skulls and damaged souls. That Venetian, lacking a Puritan’s humility but not a Puritan’s familiarity with Scripture, would boast to her, “ I kill and make