Portsmouth

Portsmouth was the oldest trade in the world and I was twenty years old and had run out of ideas.

I had not run out of options. I would learn, over the three centuries that followed, that there are always more options than you can see when you are twenty and have recently buried your mother and spent two years in the woods eating deer and answering to no name worth keeping. But at twenty the options beyond the obvious one were not visible to me, so I did what seemed practical.

The harbor at Portsmouth was the deepest natural harbor in all of New England; the ships came through it like answers to questions the colony kept asking. I watched them from the waterfront and thought about destinations. I thought about the distance between here and there. I thought about the fact that women were not permitted on ships because they were bad luck, which struck me even then as a commentary on the people making the rule rather than on the women.

The work was what it was. I do not propose to dress it otherwise or to perform a suffering beyond what was actual. I was twenty and I needed to eat and I had skills and I applied them. The work required a particular kind of distance, a way of being present and elsewhere at the same time; it turned out I had been practicing this since I was eight years old and my mother first told me to keep the most important thing in my life out of sight.

I was good at the work. I was not happy in it. These are not always the same condition, and for a year or so they were not for me.

What I remember most is not the work but the harbor. The smell of salt and pine and fresh-cut timber and tar. The lights of the ships after dark, yellow and swaying, going somewhere I was not. The sound of the water against the pilings, patient and indifferent.

I was not a patient woman even then. Indifference I have since perfected.

On a May evening in 1696, Sings found me on the waterfront, watching the lights. She came the way she always came: without announcement, as though she had simply always been standing there. I had not seen her in a year. I had been looking, in the way you look for something when you cannot admit to yourself that you have been looking.

I looked at her in the lantern light and understood that she was different. Not just the stillness I had noticed before, not just the nights-only. Something else. Something I did not yet have words for.

I had been learning to read the world since the Naumkeag country. I could read what I was looking at.

I waited for her to tell me what she would tell me.