Free Animal Appetite by Susan Conant Page B

India had her U.D.—Utility Dog title—and was working on her U.D.X. The X is for excellent, and excellent is just what she is. The title Perfect Bitch obviously belonged to someone other than India. In the eyes of Steve and all four dogs, I read the message that we should have stayed home.

    Fortunately, as we started down the path, the rain stopped, the sky brightened, and our foul moods began to evaporate. When I’d called the New Hampshire Historical Society for directions, I’d envisioned the scene of Hannah’s massacre as a small and perhaps inaccessible island in the middle of the Merrimack, which I imagined as wide, rocky, and turbulent, bubbling with the confluent waters of the Contoocook River. To my surprise, I’d been told that there was a footbridge. I pictured a narrow, rustic suspension bridge with footing that might prove treacherous to the dogs. By now, the entire episode of Hannah’s captivity had acquired such significance in my mind that it never occurred to me that anyone would have marred the site by running railroad tracks straight through the island. In all my reading, I might mention, I’d come across only one other person, a man, Leslie Fiedler, who found Hannah as consequential as I did. According to Fiedler, Hannah’s story represented the characteristically American and feminist recasting of the European myth of the damsel in distress. What weakened a lot of the points he made, however, was his failure to get the facts right. According to Fiedler, the Haverhill Hannah was a stone monument of a woman in a sunbonnet who held a tomahawk in a “delicate” hand. Bronze, no hat, a hatchet, not a tomahawk, and a hand toughened by rough work. A hand, in fact, like mine. Furthermore, central to Fiedler’s argument was the image of offended motherhood’s defense of a male child. The murdered child, however, was a baby girl.

    But back to the island, which was barely that: a few acres separated from the riverbank by marshy water and nowhere near the center of the confluence. The Merrimack and the Contoocook were dark, flat, and not half the width I’d imagined. The old iron railroad bridge didn’t even have to stretch hard to link land to island. As we followed the tracks across, Steve said, “The river would’ve been higher in March.”

    “Yes, but not all that much. In a pinch, you could swim across.”

    “Maybe not at that time of year. And they probably didn’t know how to swim.”

    “True. The river was in flood, I think. And if they’d gotten wet, they might’ve frozen to death.”

    I hadn’t known or maybe had forgotten that there was a monument on the island. I suppose I’d harbored some crazy expectation of crawling around in the moldy remains of a skin-covered tent or unearthing the skeleton of one of the birch-bark canoes that Hannah had scuttled before she fled. After three hundred years, needless to say, no trace remained. The abandoned tracks and a dirt path took us through a wooded area of bare-limbed maples and low evergreens to a big clearing.

    In the center of the clearing, near the river, rose a monument much taller than the one in Haverhill and far more funereal in appearance, a massive pillar of gray granite topped with a gray granite Hannah. She leaned forward in a way that reminded me of a figurehead on a ship. The bodice of her dress dipped low, and her arms were bare. Her left hand didn’t point in accusation, but rested at her hip. In it she clutched what could have been an upside-down bouquet of wilted flowers with round, flat blossoms.

    Scalps.

    Her right arm hung at her side. The hand had once held a hatchet. The blade remained. The handle was broken. Most of Hannah’s nose was missing.

    On the four sides of the pillar beneath this Hannah were rectangular slabs with rounded tops. The panels looked like tombstones. There were no pictures on them, just words. The one on the front started out in Latin and switched to English:

     
HEROUM GESTA
FIDES