PART ONE

R

North side of Red House

hatch: To keep silence. A hatch before the door. hatch (nautical) A moveable planking forming a kind of deck in ships. Under Hatches = below deck. Over Hatches = overboard. A square or oblong opening in the deck by which cargo is lowered into the hold. Under the Hatches : Down in position or circumstances; in a state of depression, humiliation, subjection or restraint; down out of sight. hatch: A wooden bed frame. A hatchet. A knot. To incubate. To brood. hatch: The action of hatching, incubation; that which is hatched, a brood of young. hatch: To engrave or draw a series of lines, usually parallel.

—Partial definition, Oxford English Dictionary

 

One

Red House, circa 1900

Before the highway, the oil slick, the outflow pipe; before

the blizzard, the sea monster, the Girl Scout camp; before the nudist colony and flower farm; before the tidal wave broke the river's mouth, salting the cedar forest; before the ironworks, tack factory, and shoe-peg mill; before the landing where skinny-dipping white boys jumped through berry bushes; before hayfield, ferry, oyster bed; before Daniel Webster's horses stood buried in their graves; before militiamen's talk of separating; before Unitarians and Quakers, the shipyards and mills, the nineteen barns burned in the Indian raid—even then the Hatches had already built the Red House.

The surname Hatch most commonly means a half-door, or gate, an entrance to a village or manor house. It describes a person who stands by the gate; a person newly born; a person who waits.

My father could not wait. He had made an appointment with a real-estate agent, but when he found himself on a house

call in Marshfield , Massachusetts , he decided to see the Red House himself. It was August 1965, and he was a thirty-three-year-old Harvard Medical School graduate with a crew cut and bow tie, married to my mother for just four months. Done with his residency and his army service, he had begun to specialize in radiology—broken bones, mammograms, GI series. The practice of seeing through people. With all the self-consciousness of a latter-day Gatsby, he would eventually raise a herd of kids patchworked together as “New Englanders”—four from his first marriage, four with my mother. But for now he was moonlighting for extra cash and driving his sky-blue VW Beetle down dirt roads, into brambles and dead-ends.

Marshfield , then as now, is a coastal community thirty miles south of Boston , 225 miles north of New York City , whose famous residents over the years have included “The Great Compromiser” Daniel Webster, some Kennedy offspring, and Steve Tyler of Aerosmith. Driving through the north part of town, my father passed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses, two ponds where mills had been. The afternoon light lay drowsy, the air motoring with insects. He knew he was getting close to something, and his stomach clenched. He had always loved ancient rooflines and stone walls, half-collapsed barns—templates of what had come before—plain churches, fields rolling down to rivers, shipyards. Yet, within this two-mile stretch, modern houses and gas stations had grown up around their remains like flesh over bone. He was following his intuition, as if, eyes closed in a dream, he felt his way with his hands stretched out. The road began a violent S-curve at the edge of a string of ponds. At the blind part of the curve, my father found the road to the house, and turned there to begin the half-mile drive past yet another pond.

He drove by the dilapidated Hatch Mill, over the narrow bridge, then through a canopy of crab-apple trees, over a stream that ran beneath the road. It was the last few weeks of summer,

and the timothy was high at the roadside, the milkweed setting off parachute seeds.

Meanwhile, in the adjacent town of Norwell , in the apartment he was renting, my mother was preparing his four children for a bath. They were: Kim, seven; Kerry, five; Kate, four; and Patrick, three. The children were spending the summer away from their mother in California . They had been to Martha's Vineyard , Benson's Wild Animal Farm; they had spent the day riding bicycles on the blacktop driveway.

Lately a raccoon had been banging the lids of the garbage cans below the second-floor bathroom window each night. “That raccoon with his black mask, that thief,” they'd say. My mother was relieved: animal stories were common ground. She said, “It's getting dark; do you think the raccoon is out there?” She squeezed Johnson's baby shampoo into one hand, and then turned the water off. The children shrieked, “Raccoon! Raccoon!” Pale-skinned kids with tan lines: Kim, tall, broad-cheekboned; Kerry and Patrick, a girl-and-boy matched pair with the same androgynous haircut; Kate, a tantrum-throwing tow-head.

My mother, twenty-seven years old and petite, wore her hair long, usually in braids or in a large bun with a thin path of gray twisting through it like a skunk stripe. That day she wore it in a ratty ponytail, having had no time to brush it. Her only cosmetics: an occasional eyebrow-penciling, and lipstick in the evening if she was going out.

It had been almost four years since my mother, a lab technician, had met my father at the cafeteria in Children's Hospital in Boston . As she stood in line, she saw him leave his dirty plate and tray, linger, exit the cafeteria, and then return to the line. He was wearing his signature bow tie. He approached her and asked her to have lunch with him.

“You already ate,” she said.

“I'll eat again,” he replied.

From the beginning, my father had mentioned his divorce

and his custody of the children for school vacations and three months every summer. Early in the relationship, my father had brought my mother and the children to Cape Cod , where she had her own room in the rented cabin. Nearly every night, Kim had sanded and short-sheeted the bed, leaving seaweed and crabs under the blankets. Besides these incidents, though, the children gave her little indication that she was unwanted. Summer was over, and the next day they were returning to California . The bathtub was by the window, and when they stood at the edge, the children could look down on the dented lids of the three garbage cans. My father had said that the house call would take only an hour at most. Now it was getting late, and my mother had no idea where he was.

He rounded the corner at a large white house, turning sharply to the right at a vine-covered lamppost. He drove through two large stones that made a gate. Then, suddenly, the house was before him, rambling to his left along the crest of a ridge. Below, to his right, a yard fell away into a field of ragweed, bullfrogs.

In architectural terms, the house my father saw would be described as a five-bay, double-pile, center-chimney colonial. It had post-and-beam vertical-board construction, a granite foundation, and small-paned windows. The windows were trimmed with chipped white paint, the body of the house was a deep red—Delicious Apple Red, Long Stem Rose Red, Evening Lip-Stick Red, Miss Scarlett Red, a red that neared maroon. Otherwise, the house was plain and, with its the chimney in the middle of the roof against a backdrop of sky, appeared as simple as a child's drawing of a house: big square and triangle, smaller square on top. The cornice seemed the only detail out of place: attached to the doorway as if to elevate the exterior from utilitarian farmhouse to Victorian estate, it hinted at Greek or Roman Revival, something lofty—like a hood ornament on a Dodge Dart.

The house was large and debauched. Four bushes grown shaggy with tendrils sat beneath the first-floor windows. Lilac trees tangled the farthest ell. The driveway wound around the house to the right, where it climbed a small hill. In the backyard, a man and woman sat in lawn chairs drinking old-fashioneds. It was 5 p.m.

My father, stepping out of the rusted VW, might have appeared to Richard Warren Hatch and his wife, Ruth, to be an affable character—friendly and perhaps a bit too unassuming, with a boyish way of loping when he walked. My father was raised in Polo, Illinois , a small farming town known only for its proximity to Dixon , the birthplace of Ronald Reagan. He was six foot two, with dark hair and bright-blue eyes, size-thirteen feet, crooked teeth, prominent ears, and a nose that had been broken seven times playing football. He was the son of a cattle-feed salesman and a grocery-store clerk. In 1948, he was the captain of his high school's undefeated and untied state-champion football team—a 188-pound fullback once described as a “ripping, slashing ball carrier capable of chewing an opponent's line to shreds.” He was from a one-street, one-chicken-fried-steak-restaurant, one-road-leading-out-into-cornfields, one-stand-of-trees, one-historical-marker-from-the-Indian-war, one-railroad-track town. A town with a history of drive-by prairie schooners. More than anything, he had wanted to get out, and probably even now, sixteen years later, he still wore that desire in the face he presented to the unknown, to strangers. Few of my father's ancestors had ever owned anything; his parents still rented the house they'd lived in for twenty years. Harvard had taught him to love tradition and antiquity, and my father was impatient for a life he had only caught glimpses of in the educated accents of professors and the boiled-wool sweaters of his college roommates' parents. He was looking for a piece of history different from the one his own heritage had provided him. He was looking for just this type of New England home.

The older couple did not get up to greet my father when he closed the car door. But they did smile. So he walked up the yard toward the house and their arrangement of chairs. “I've got an appointment to see the house on Monday,” he said. It was now Saturday. “Oh yes,” Richard Warren Hatch said, “we've heard about you.”

R

Inside, the house was low-ceilinged and dark. Hatch led my father through the honeycomb of rooms, past walls with buckled plaster and wide-paneled boards. Doors slanted in their frames, wind blew out the mouths of small fireplaces. Candleholders extended from mantels like robot arms. Rooms opened into more rooms of boxed and hand-hewn beams. A staircase on the north side of the house unfolded itself like a tight, narrow fan, disappearing to the second floor. The house smelled old, the product of its accumulated history—books and talcum powder, wood, silver polish.

Hatch showed my father old photos in which the paint peeled off the house in ribbons, the sides clapboarded and bowed, the trim gone gray. Hatch had hardly led my father through the inside of the house and already he was revealing its history—the way a parent might present to guests his child's baby pictures, framed drawings, and graduation photos arranged along a hallway before introducing the actual child. The photos depicted several driveways ringed with post, fences long gone, absent gates—the house standing starkly in a nude landscape. They showed a house often in disrepair: sagging roofline, loose shingles. In one photo, a barn loomed larger than the house, extending at a right angle toward the pond. The house and the barn together formed an elongated ell. Windows stacked three stories up the barn's flat red side. The roofs glowed grayish in the

photo, and in the foreground, hoed rows of a garden extended toward the bottom of the frame. One photo, circa 1900, showed three small children standing in front of the house in long white shifts that glowed like filament against the dark clapboards.

What the photos did not show, of course, was the beginning—the narrowness of the first structure, the forest behind it, the river a distant smudge, the piles of stumps and roots torn out of the ground, the parts that could not be used for shipbuilding knees burned in bonfires. The photos did not show the stones dug out of the earth for cellars and walls. How the house exterior was first covered with boards, or the roof thatched with reeds, or the windows crosshatched. The photos did not show the close-string stairway replacing a ladder, or someone stand-ing too far in the kitchen's giant hearth when the pot spilled and a skirt hem caught flame, burning lard pouring out over the floor. The photos caught occasional in-between moments, but they implied more, and my father, prodded by Hatch, began to imagine the lives of ancestors—Puritans, shipbuilders, somber Victorians—the blurred wheels of a chaise along the lane in a time before telephone poles.

Hatch led my father, finally, to the root cellar beneath the house. They walked through the tin-backed door from the boiler room into what Hatch called “the passageway.” It was more of a tunnel, really, twenty feet long and curving slightly—the stone walls supported by cement and brick. When he extended his arms to the side, my father could touch both walls in the passageway, the stones damp, sweating. My father was fidgeting, talking too much.

“My parents lived in Chicago ,” he said. “They never finished high school.”

The passageway opened into a large underground room where stood part of a chimney, the carved-out kettle drum of the original cellar behind a stairway of half-log beams that led up to a trapdoor in the ceiling, which was the floor of a closet in

a room above them. It was the most primitive part of the house. The room smelled of something sweet and dank. Several potatoes grew eyes in the corner. Wires stapled to the underside of boards of the floor above snarled with webs, the mummified bodies of spiders.

“My father played poker with John Dillinger,” my father said. “During the Depression, he had a general store that went under.”

“These are very old beams,” Hatch said, pointing up. “They're part of the original cellar and structure of the old part of the house.”

My father stopped, looked up at the beams.

“My mother, you know, she has a heart condition—rheumatoid, arrhythmia.”

Hatch nodded, seemed distracted. He was built like a ladder. A bunch of wiry hair grew out of his eyebrows. Whenever he talked, his voice boomed off stone, as if the volume were turned up too loud in the room. My father found himself nodding; the tone of Hatch's voice was one of antiquarian authority.

My father, a storyteller, thought of narratives he could recycle in the appropriate occasion. “One time . . .” Or “I once knew this crazy guy . . .” But he had learned Hatch was a writer; had been the head of the English department at Deerfield Academy from 1925 to 1941; had served aboard the battleship New Mexico and the aircraft carrier Yorktown in World War II; had been married with kids and divorced; had since 1951 lectured at the Center for International Studies at MIT, researching and writing about U.S. foreign policy. He had more stories to tell than my father.

Earlier, Hatch had told my father that his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Walter Hatch had built the house in 1647; that it had always been called the “Red House”; that it was one of the first houses built in this area called Two Mile, which was also casually referred to as “Hatchville” thanks to

prolific and intermarrying progeny. As a testament to this, Walter Hatch's framed will, dated 1681 and written in legal English, hung on the living-room wall as it always had, stating that the house should be passed on to “heirs begotten of my body forever from generation to generation to the world's end never to be sold or mortgaged from my children and grandchildren forever.” While talking to my father, Hatch had traced the lines of the will with his finger. My father was having difficulty absorbing everything. He gazed at the will, the paper the color of a grocery bag trapped under the glass now streaked with Hatch's fingermarks.

“This house has been in my family for eight generations,” Hatch repeated, delivering his most subtle sales pitch. “The Oldest Continuously Lived-In House in New England ,” he said.

On the cement floor beneath my father's feet, Hatch's two sons had carved their names in cement: “Dick and Toph '41.” If the house had been in the family for over three hundred years, my father wondered, why was Hatch going against the weight of tradition and selling it? But he kept his mouth shut, fearing that Hatch would suddenly snap out of it, change his mind.

“I need to talk with my wife,” my father said.

R

The distance from the Red House to the apartment my parents were renting was five miles. My father turned off the rattling VW motor and coasted into the driveway. Then he rounded the corner of the house and stood under the second-floor window by the garbage cans. He grabbed the lids and smashed them together. Inside, the children rushed to the window—“raccoon, raccoon!”—bare feet across the floor. Instead they saw their father in tan corduroys and bow tie, a lid in each hand. He saw their faces crowding the panes, their hands on the glass. He entered the apartment through the back door, ran up the stairs to the kitchen, and shouted my mother's nickname: “Scout, Scout!” He insisted she and the kids come see the house, dressed as they were in pajamas and slippers. He said, “This house . . . ,” standing there with his elbows at his side, hands clenched before him, as if he were holding ski poles, skiing in place, one foot, then the other slaloming the floorboards. “Come now,” was all he could say.

Patrick followed his sisters and stepmother downstairs to the driveway, dragging the worn remnant of a stuffed animal behind him. “You've got to see it,” my father said.

Then, suddenly, they were bumping along in the crowded VW. My mother had Patrick on her lap with the hairless toy. “Who is this?” she asked.

“Rabbit,” said Patrick.

My mother looked at herself in the tiny square mirror on the sun visor and saw behind her the three girls flopped over each other in the back seat. Patrick dropped the rabbit between her knees, where he saw bits of road through the rusted floor-holes. “Uh . . . nope!” my mother said, as she pinched her knees and caught the toy.

My mother never spoke about herself, and when speaking with others was forthright and blunt, often offending listeners unintentionally with her honesty. This habit was derived from her attempt to lose her “Southernness”—the friendly openness, the drawn-out syllables. She would rather say nothing, or say something sharp, because she really believed her Southernness was a cliché, and it reminded her of her childhood, which she preferred to forget.

All my mother ever said about my grandmother was that she divorced my grandfather in order to marry her second cousin, had a thick Southern accent, smoked two packs of Camel no-filters a day, kept a shot glass of whiskey at her side, and died when my mother was twenty-two.

“We were,” as she often put it, “a bunch of Georgia crackers.”

After her parents' divorce, my mother moved with her mother and stepfather to Allapattah , Florida . She was eight years old and spent most of her time weaving through kumquat hedges behind the apartment building, or sitting in the mulberry tree with a neighbor girl who lived in a house with an old stove tossed in the front yard—no toilet or running water. They would sit all day in the tree, pelting fruit at the stove and getting stains on their hands, until one day my mother got head lice and wasn't allowed to see the girl again. “White trash,” her stepfather said, and my mother thought about the stove they had just thrown in their yard, which was white enamel. White trash. Yet, the next year, they moved to a housing project in North Miami where all the buildings were one-story cinder block built on coral rock and barbed grass. Behind the development, through a thin strand of trees, sat a working slaughterhouse on the edge of a rust-brown river. Bits of hoof and bone chips had been carried off by dogs, scattered on the banks. Her only brother dared her to swing across the “river of blood,” as he called it, holding a rope swing tied to a tree. She watched a series of her brother's friends swing out and over to the other side. Then she did and missed, fell up to her knees in slime and viscera, had to bury her stained tennis sneakers in the woods so her mother would not know.

By sixteen, my mother had developed the habit of hanging out with bikers. When her father saw her wearing pink leather pants, she was immediately sent to a girls' school in Virginia , where she learned the correct posture for walking downstairs in pumps, how to get out of a car while wearing a skirt. She graduated from high school, went to junior college, then transferred at nineteen to an elite private college in Vermont .

When she arrived at the college, she possessed seven pairs of elbow-length gloves dyed in pastel colors to match her collection of semiformal dresses, but no one had ever told her about snow. Sometime in late October 1957, seeing snow fall for the first

time, she rushed out of the dormitory wearing canvas tennis sneakers, no socks. After a forty-five-minute snowball fight, she was taken to the clinic and diagnosed with frostbite.

She compensated for this naïveté with toughness and nonplussed Southern denial—“I'll just put that out of my mind,” she'd say, as if determining, since leaving the South, that nothing was going to bother her anymore. The result was very Yankee-tomboy. She was always Pat—never Patricia, or Patty, or Patsy—and eventually she rejected that for Scout. As in: hunter/tracker; the girl in To Kill a Mockingbird, a book my father happened to be reading the day he asked her out. In photos taken before they were married, she sported a boy's haircut and held a rifle at her side. A series of photos shows her taking aim and knocking off rounds of clay pigeons.

Now, three years later, her arm out the window of the Volkswagen, she traced the landscape on the way to the house. Absentmindedly, she aimed. They were passing fields of tall grass, square colonial houses, stone walls. The sky was growing gray; her eye caught the spark of a firefly at the roadside.

“The kids are falling asleep,” she said, pulling her arm back in.

R

They arrived at the Red House to find the Hatches exactly where my father had first seen them: sitting in chairs on the lawn, halfway through their drinks, eating cheese and crackers. My mother stood with her hands on someone's small shoulders, introducing herself and the children.

In the yard behind them, two apple trees stretched their umbrellas over a carpet of wormy green-apple windfalls. The children were told to stand by the apple trees. My father and mother disappeared into the house with Mr. Hatch. The kids made little piles of apples. Ruth Hatch stood nearby, clasping her hands, her soft white hair swept up.

Richard Warren Hatch brought my parents through the east

ell to a modern kitchen, and then into the older portion of the house. Stepping over the threshold, my mother noticed crooked doorways and floors. A half-model of a ship pushed out of the fireplace mantel.

When he would talk about that day, my father always said, “You could tell that they really liked us. And we really liked them. I think the fact that he had been married before and then was divorced . . . I think he looked at us with the knowledge that I had been married before, and he was very open-minded.”

“We moved all the time when I was a child,” my mother heard herself say aloud, though in reality she only had moved three times. Yet this house seemed permanent. On the north side, a stairwell rose, nine curved steps, to the second floor with its bedrooms. She was in the attic, and then, just as suddenly, she was down a staircase and back in the living room, where windows stared out into the backyard. To her back was the dining room, where she had entered; to her left, a desk scattered with papers and several unplugged lamps.

Outside the house the children were silent, wandering between the apple trees and stepping barefoot over mashed apples. Patrick stuck his arm into a hole in the tree and pulled it back out. The air carried the smell of marsh; they walked to the edge of the meadow, looking for ferns.

My mother and father left the house and crossed the lawn, where they talked behind a bush.

“What do you think?” he whispered. “Do you want to buy it?” He grabbed her arm, brought his face close to hers. My mother kept glancing at the children.

Hatch asked Kim to go with them—him and my father—for a walk down into the woods.

“I'll show you the clearing,” he said, “and the Indian burial ground.”

Kim walked between them past a meadow and into the pines, the carpet of needles. They walked along a stone wall. Hatch

described the salt hay that had stretched down to the river and the “rabbit runs”: mounds of earth piled up for bridges across marshes, and used for the shipbuilding trade.

“Those rabbits like high ground,” Hatch said, looking at Kim and winking. Kim imagined legions of rabbits building small rabbit-ships.

They traveled down a hill, where the road curved and the wall broke open, and found another gate. They walked through trees and into a large clearing. Here clumps of soft grass and moss grew around fieldstones and overturned granite posts.

“This is an Indian burial ground,” Hatch said. “Go and play.” He was talking to my father in serious tones, occasionally looking toward Kim and shouting, “You might find an arrowhead! Go ahead and look.” Kim walked on top of a few of the sidelined slabs of granite. She dug her hand down into a clump of grass, where she felt roots, a rock.

The rock was pink with white veins running through it like pork fat. “You mean like this one?” she asked, holding it up in her hand. Upside down, it could have been a heart. They were talking about the house, she realized, about money. “I found an arrowhead!”

“Well, I'll be darned,” said Hatch. “Nobody has found an arrowhead down here for twenty years.”

R

My mother wished that she could brush her hair. She excused herself from Ruth and went into the bathroom off the kitchen. There she found a blue plastic comb on the sink, picked it up, put it back down. It was getting dark outside, all the light seeping out. She took the elastic band out of her hair, ran her fingers through it, and put the elastic back in.

Outside, she heard Hatch's deep voice. He was telling Ruth and the children about Kim's arrowhead. Kim held out her palm to them but did not let anyone touch it. It was night now; the bats were out, swooping as if pulled by strings. My father was at my mother's side again, asking her the same question about the house: “Should we get it?”

That summer, they had been discussing moving to Berkeley , California , to be closer to his children. In fact, they had been sure of it. My father had already accepted a position at a San Francisco hospital, and was scheduled to begin in October. Now, in one night, in a few hours of walking through a house, he was changing his mind. She looked at him, studying his face. She knew he was impulsive, but he'd never done anything like this before.

“Decide where you want to live,” she said. There were houses, she knew, that you bought simply to inhabit—apartments or houses like those she had grown up in—nothing special. And then there were houses that could change your life: the rooms, the walls, the roof, the land, and view from its windows could reshape you, mold you. This house was older than most of New England ; it wasn't the kind of house you just bought and sold. If they bought this house, my mother was certain they'd have to live in it for the rest of their lives.

Across the lawn she saw the glow of the children's pajamas against the dark shape of trees and the roofline.

“It's your decision,” she said, finally.

“This is where I want to live,” he answered.

The Land

1614–1647

New England , 1677

Seip or sepu: The Algonquin word for “river,” derived from a root that means “stretched out,” “extended,” or “became long.”

Peske-tuk: The division of a river by some obstacle, near its mouth, which makes it a “double river,” or a “split river” divided forcibly or abruptly.

—J. Hammond Trumbull , “Algonquin Indians—Place Names,”

collection of Connecticut Historical Society, vol. 2, p. 7

 

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In the early seventeenth century, the North River zagged through the New England landscape the way lightning appeared in the night sky. Fed by more than forty kettle ponds and lakes, the river split itself between fresh and salt water. The fresh water upstream curved its way through glacial deposits and granite; the salt water downstream, with its rise and fall of tide, entered and left the mouth every six hours. The river reflected a sky flocked with swans and folded itself until it split in an area called “the crotch” at Indian Head and Herring Brook. From there, each deep channel and switchback would later be called a “no-gain” by the English settlers, a bend that doubles back on itself like a trick or a sleight-of-hand. In the inlet, the North River joined its twin, the South River . The two rivers would stay locked this way until, centuries later, a violent storm would pull their mouths apart.

One of the earliest recordings of interaction between the European and Algonquin people was written in 1614 by Captain John Smith, who, along with a small party of men, was exploring an inlet in the northeasternmost tip of what would later become Plymouth Colony. From some distance, Smith observed

three men in an open canoe moving quickly across the water toward an outcropping of rocks. The inlet was a wide skirt of water fanning from the ocean over marshland and into the North River . At the time, the Algonquin Nation stretched down the entire East Coast, including Manhattan and the Hudson River Valley , a confederacy of tribes. Governor Bradford and his band of Pilgrims, searching for their own promised land farther south, in the curved arm of Cape Cod, would not arrive until ten years later.

In the inlet, the men who disappeared behind the outcropping of rock shot arrows at Captain Smith. Smith and his party responded with gunfire, killing one man and shooting another in the thigh. So this was one beginning: no sharing of corn and blankets, just a whiz of arrow shafts and gunpowder, an anonymous volley across water that ended in balls of lead pushing through flesh. And then Smith pushed his pen, a carved goose-feather, across paper made of torn rags. He took this back to England with him as some sort of record or discovery. He dragged ink across the paper landscape the same way that land grants were drawn up only twenty years later, and the inlet, the river, and the lands surrounding them became the property of the English.

The inlet would eventually become the town of Scituate , Plymouth Colony's largest port, and the rocky outcropping would sport a lighthouse and later a mansion called the Glades, the summer retreat house of U.S. presidents John and John Quincy Adams.

But in 1614, this inlet had not yet appeared on any English map. Scituate , which takes its name from the Algonquin word for “cold brook,” was the second settlement established within the Plymouth Colony patent, after Plymouth itself.

When the English returned to New England in 1623, they discovered that smallpox, introduced by European fishermen, had destroyed more than 90 percent of the native population. William Bradford and scouts from the Mayflower found abandoned fields,

unused storehouses of corn and grain buried in shallow hills. The cultivated lands and the villages were empty or filled with dead, and those who survived were too weak to fight. It was as if the English walked right into an abandoned house—filled with furniture and stores of food—finding the owners gone.

R

When William Wood published New England's Prospect in London in 1634, he included Scituate as a jagged outline running along the ocean, made up of four cliffs: First, Second, Third, and Fourth. The cliffs rose from the beach—steep and stacked behind each other like cards. Barren, slapped by wind and rain, they were void of fresh running water. The land along the North River was deeded to Scituate Planters in a grant called Two Mile, two miles long and one mile wide—a direct response to the complaint that the land in the town was “too narrow and straight” to farm.

The Two Mile settlers used the river, not the highways, for transportation and trade, and generally did what they wanted. The grant, though only three square miles, included “all woods, trees & rocks ponds rivers swamps meadows,” and the settlers quickly used all of them, flushing the swamps of wolves, enforcing various animal taxes, felling the giant trees. Isolated and unpoliced by either Plymouth or Boston , they were fiercely autonomous river-people who continually split their churches, argued over baptism rites and land boundaries, built houses, and set about defending them against natives, other immigrants, and natural and supernatural disasters.

Walter Hatch was born in Kent , England , in 1623, two years after the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth . In 1634, he immigrated to Scituate with his father, William Hatch, his mother, and five siblings on a ship called the Hercules. William Hatch was a wealthy wool merchant, descendant of a line of farmers hailing from County Kent (the village of

Selling), where they named their land parcels Horselife, Pierce Gardyn, Stone Regg, and Sandpytts. By the time William left with his family for America , he was tired of squabbling over tiny patches of English soil, arguing about the corrupt church, the shifting ideas of the soul, good deeds versus grace.

When the Hatch family arrived, Scituate wasn't much better—just a narrow row of house lots bordering large cleared areas of land called “the commons.” By 1642, approximately twenty-four thousand people had settled in New England . Puritans, with an already high sense of the symbolic, were living, worshipping, and drinking in a new and wild landscape. Householders were required to bring six blackbird heads into the town hall each season as a tax. Eels were dug out of the riverbanks, skinned, and thrown in stews or pottages. The air smelled like gunpowder and roasting meat. Eventually, a woman in Scituate accused her neighbor of turning into a bear; a brother and sister were caught embracing in the same bed; in Plymouth there was an unfortunate incident involving a young man and a pony. Walter's brother-in-law died from burns he received when, during a routine check of his artillery, the powder house exploded in a giant fireball. At sixteen, Walter was old enough to bear arms and become a freeman with voting power; at twenty-four in 1647, he bought some land in Two Mile, separated from the main town by the river, salt-hay fields, and forest. Compared with Kent , England , or even Scituate proper, it was an outpost of an outpost.

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In order to define what was his, Walter walked the land and carved his initials into the trunks of trees. Starting at the southeast corner of the lot, near the marsh and the old cartway, he walked 160 paces to a tree where he cut a mark with his knife. Then he moved west sixty rods to a heap of stones—walking, swinging his arms around white oak, pine. Turning to the northeast and the first marked tree, Walter created a circle around ten

acres of swamp and swampy meadow. Boundaries were set at the cartway, the heap of rocks, and his marked trees carved with the letters “W.H.” and three notched lines.

Walter had purchased the land from Thomas and Elizabeth Ensign, who had purchased it years earlier from Timothy Hatherly, a partner in a large land deal called the Conihasset Grant established with native leader Josiah Wampatuck. The grant—containing vast tracts of land in six separate townships—ended with the inscription:

This is the marke of

X

Josiah Wampatucke

The “X” represented ownership, relinquishment. Josiah Wampatuck was the son and heir of Sachem (or Chief) Chickotaubutt, a name the settlers translated to mean “House-on-fire.” Walter Hatch would build a house on this land that would embody the meaning of that name, and be inherited by Hatches for more than three hundred years. But before the house, there was the idea of the house. Perhaps it had been in Walter's mind for years—in his passage from England, smelling a month of salt water and ship, and then, slowly, something more solid, leafy, the inkling of a horizon. Now Walter was the stranger who walked into Two Mile, the way the idea of the house had walked into his mind, into his crowded forest of thoughts. As he walked, perhaps he placed his hands on the trunks of trees as he moved among them, as if they were the waists of dancers in a reel. Circling the trees, perhaps he realized that he owned them now—the native sachem, the earlier settlers had relinquished, and he had stepped in. Their loss was his gain, and so it had begun—swinging his arms around the trunks of trees, his future walls and roof.

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“Scout” Messer with her gun

When my parents next returned to the Red House, Richard Warren Hatch gave them a pair of yellowed whale's teeth. It had been three days since my father had walked up to the Hatches and said, “OK, we'll take it,” and Richard Warren had stuck out his hand, grinning. They had invited my parents over for old-fashioneds—in Hatch's words, to “talk things over, to get to know one another.”

My parents had been back in the Red House just two minutes when Hatch handed over the teeth—five inches long and decorated with faint scrimshaw. He said that they had been given by a returning whaleman to one of his ancestors. Each tooth had a figure carved on its front and back—four in total, one man and three women.

The carving looked faint, as if penciled or simply scratched. My father tilted a tooth in the light to see the rendering clearly. The portrait certainly looked like a sailor: a bearded man leaning

against a stool and holding a telescope, his body a thin outline. The other side depicted a woman in profile sitting on a bucket. The second tooth showed a barefoot woman nursing a baby, and another dressed for travel with a hat and fan. Richard Warren said that he had found the teeth under a board in the attic, the same place he had discovered many of the family documents. The teeth felt heavy and smooth; they fit in my father's palm like the butt of a pistol. “At least a hundred years old.” Hatch nodded.

That evening, my parents returned to the apartment and sat on the only good piece of furniture they owned—a large four-poster bed. They talked it out. Thirty-five acres and an old house. When my father talked, he looked at his hands, which were heavy and square. They needed twelve thousand dollars for a down payment. My father's children were spending the school year in California with their mother. They had been giddy, chatty on the way to the airport, asking, “Did you buy it? Are we going to live here now?” They had fought over the arrowhead in the back seat. Now, my mother sat on the bed with her feet tucked beneath her, pushing her hair behind her ears, a nervous habit. She said that her father might be able to cosign a note, as she held a pad of paper in her lap and touched the end of a pencil occasionally to her lips.

My father's name, Messer, means “knife”; my mother's, Watrouse, means “water house.” Together they were a blade sliding through water, a knife tossed in a lake, sinking fast, or a jackknife found in an outhouse. Or maybe they were a way to get things done quickly, cutting through the waste or bullshit of a moment. But with the Red House, it certainly didn't feel that way. When asked by friends why he wasn't moving to California to be near his children, my father shifted agency—“The house made the decision for us,” he would say. Although relatives had come through with money in the first few weeks, it wasn't enough. The closing date was set for October, and as it grew

closer, my parents' finances grew tighter, my father's stories about the house more overblown: “Scout and I looked at her, fell in love, and decided to get married. We're marrying the house,” he'd joke. “It was love at first sight.”

Meanwhile, the cocktails with the Hatches became a nightly ritual. The drinks outside on the lawn moved inside with the colder weather, then turned into dinner, and soon my mother and Ruth were cooking together while my father and Richard Warren built fires in the fireplaces and hauled various pieces of furniture in and out. Ruth was what my mother called “artsy.” Sometimes after dinner she would take my mother up into her “studio,” one of the bedrooms on the second floor of the Red House. The room was scattered with oil paints and brushes. Ruth practiced tole—elaborate painting on tin trays popular in the late nineteenth century. She gave my mother copies of her patterns and some extra brushes, encouraging her to paint. “A good hobby,” Ruth said, “for people who are living at least a hundred years in the past.”

After dinner, the four of them would sit on the camel-backed couch in the living room in front of the fire. Most of their conversations fixated on the Red House of Richard Warren's youth, when his grandfather Israel H. still lived there with no electricity or plumbing. Hatch also talked of the restoration he did in the late 1930s. After his father and grandfather died, the house was finally his. But for years, when he was raising his own family, Richard Warren could only spend summers and long weekends at the Old Farm, as he called it.

My parents had their own histories to tell, but they didn't divulge much. My mother talked of Georgia and Florida —the kumquat hedges, the slaughterhouse river, spinning in circles on the lawn while her mother, leaning on the porch rail in a red kerchief, played the same Dominos 45 over and over again and smoked. My father talked about Chicago —how his father drove a lettuce truck and his mother worked in a German deli; how

they lived in a one-room flat where my grandfather would host John Dillinger and his poker games; how my grandfather, too poor to own a gun, always left the laces of one shoe untied so he could slip it off quickly and throw it at someone. “Wham, like that,” my father pantomimed, imitating my grandfather's shoe-fling.

“Charming,” Hatch would say. “Simply charming.” And he seemed to believe this.

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My parents moved into the Red House at the end of October—miraculously, the money had come through. The last two thousand of it came through the auspices of Mrs. Berini, Italian immigrant and owner of Berini's Meats in Cambridge , who, when told about the house by my father, her favorite customer, replied, “So you still need two thousand? So you really love this house?” And then she reached under the counter and pulled out a crumpled paper bag, counted out two thousand in twenties right there, a line of customers looking on. “Just invite me down sometime,” she said, “and pay me back when you can, no interest.” Now the key, less than twenty-four hours old in my father's hand, turned the lock at the back door of the kitchen ell. My parents were giggling, walking across the kitchen linoleum, feeling the echo of absence—Ruth and Richard Warren were gone. The empty walls and rooms were quiet except for the hum and tick of appliances. It seemed that the Hatches should still be there, that at any minute Richard or Ruth would float down

the stairs and greet them, confused that their belongings were gone. My parents walked down the narrow hallway past clusters of boxes, then lifted the latch that let them into the old part of the house, which felt even more empty, as if the walls were made of paper. Gone were Ruth's curtains with the pompom fringe; gone were Richard's framed prints of schooners and carved decoys. In the living room, my parents' brown secondhand couch

slumped across from Hatches' dignified camel-back in a furniture face-off, the scattered boxes like witnesses circling the beginning of a street fight.

But the house didn't feel lonely, my mother said, describing that first night they walked through the hallways and parlors. Not threatening either, as they climbed the staircase to the second floor. Their four-poster still dismantled, they spent the night in the one old Hatch bed left behind. Nothing else save the camel-back remained—the walls, floors, and fireplaces swept clean. They set the whale's teeth upright on the empty mantel like sturdy, unlit candles.

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That first winter, when my father was working late, my mother sat alone by the kitchen fireplace balancing a cup of tea on her pregnant belly. One night she heard, in a distant room upstairs, the crying of a baby—a soft wail that disappeared whenever she began to climb the stairs. She thought it was the wind, the house creaking. But the noise sounded like a baby, fussy, as if it had just been woken up. Another evening, the teacup balanced, she heard the crying again. But before she could get up to search for the sound, the teacup was punted across the room. She stared at the overturned cup five feet away—a plain china cup, now with a broken handle, a small string of tea across the wooden floor as if it had crawled from the ocean. She held her hands before her, still holding the space of the cup, feeling how the cup had suddenly been pulled from her, its broken handle a parenthesis, a small letter “c.”

“A baby ghost,” Richard Warren Hatch said when she called him to ask because she just couldn't stop thinking about it. “Lots of children have been born and died in the house,” he said. “It has something to cry about.” One day a woman from the Boston Globe called—while preparing an article on old homes and ghosts, she had received my mother's name from

someone on the planning board and heard of their recent purchase of the old Hatch place. Had my mother seen any ghosts? “I think there is a ghost of a baby in this house,” my mother said. But could she prove it? the newspaper woman wanted to know.

The sound only came to my mother when she was alone. She said she didn't believe in ghosts. Trying out Yankee domesticity, she would concern herself with the recipe for crown roast of pork, the correct pigment for colonial wall paint. But a few years later, during a blizzard, she would be seen out in the snow shooting rats as they ran toward the house for shelter. She would lie awake all night with her gun by the bed, having found rat droppings under the crib of her new baby. What did she know about being domestic? She whose most vivid memory, besides that of the slaughterhouse, was of spinning on the coral rocks in back of the North Miami housing development while the drunk neighbor kicked his wife down the stairs into the backyard. Years later, when a neighbor's Great Dane wandered into the Red House yard and ripped the throat out of a poodle sitting a foot away from her children, my mother would pick up the telephone, warn the neighbor, and then shoot rock salt up the Great Dane's ass. But in the beginning, alone and pregnant in the house, she felt defenseless. She was swinging out over the slaughterhouse river, missing the bank. She had left part of herself there in Florida , with her shoes in woods. She imagined the white rubber soles of her tennis sneakers glowing underground. She wondered if they were still there—how long something could stay buried before it became something else, became dirt, disappeared. At the Red House she would hear the baby upstairs, crying from a bedroom, twice a week for six months. She knew that someone somewhere was unhappy—she just didn't know who, or where, or in what century. She would start up the stairs and the crying would stop. She would walk outside and it would be dead calm.

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One evening in early spring, Richard Warren Hatch Jr. appeared on the lawn. He was a tall man with dark eyes and thick eyebrows like his father. He stood on the north side, staring up at the house his father had just sold out of the family. My parents had met him before, informally, at a dinner the month when they had vis-

ited the Hatches at the Red House. “What does he want?” my mother was asking; she was seven months pregnant and trying to struggle out of a chair.

Even though they had only been in the house six months, my parents had heard many stories from neighbors and people in town. Richard Jr. was an artist, an inventor—some said genius, some said eccentric, some said an eccentric genius and meant it as a compliment. He was the son who was supposed to own the house, but something had happened and Richard Warren Hatch Sr. sold the house to our father instead—this was one rumor. In another version, Richard Sr. offered to sell the house to his son, but, being an inventor, Richard Jr. couldn't afford it.

Richard Jr. knocked on the front door, the one my parents never used anymore. They unbolted the door and stood in its outline, an early-spring evening shining past the man who stood outside. He said he had the money now, had sold some of his inventions which were 0's and 1's arranged in specific orders, the earliest versions of computer code. But at the time few people had even heard the word “computer.” Certainly not my parents.

Richard Jr. said something about his father's being temperamental. He said that the town of Marshfield had tried to raise money to help keep the house in the family. It apparently wasn't supposed to leave the family, so here was Richard Jr. determined to rectify the situation.

“I'm sorry,” my father said, “but you can't buy the house back. We live here now.”

Over the years my mother would tell this story and change

the details—that Richard Jr. was alone; that his wife was with him; that the wife had taught her how to cook crown roast of pork; that they were all friends. But why have we never met them? we would ask. They existed only in her words. She would tell the story sitting at our bedside, before sleep. It was, in a strange sense, a story about being born—my parents to the house, me and Suzy to the world. We, as yet unborn but listening, behind the wall of our mother as she struggled out of the chair and stood in the doorway, putting her hand to the small of her back. Told this way—so watery, so close to the edge of sleep—Richard Jr. became a ghost. The ghost at my bedside, the ghost who once stood on the lawn, waiting like a midwife. For years I would look out my window for him and see only cold moonlight—this man from the story, the person who brought us here. Years later, when asked about it, my father would say, “Don't be silly, that never happened.”

Yet all the versions of the story had one element in common: it was a mistake—we weren't supposed to have the house. This is what my older sisters and brother were told, and what they would pass on to me, and what I would pass on to my younger sisters, the same way we would tell and retell ghost stories, urban legends—the one about the dog in the suitcase, the story of the campers and the serial killer, the lady with a velvet string around her neck, the story of the Hatch who tried to get the house back. He stood on our lawn and said, “There has been a terrible mistake.” Like some sort of omen. Then he left.

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In June 1966, I was born with my legs bowed around my twin sister, Suzy, her legs pinched inward like a fin. At first they thought she would not live. My mother was having “complications.” I imagine Suzy was swimming somewhere below my vision, her curved legs like a fishtail flashing. “Mrs. Messer, you have another baby in there,” the doctors said. Until we were

born, nobody—neither my mother nor the doctors—knew that she was pregnant with twins. The only person who guessed was Kim, who, since a young child, had always been witchy. At the age of eight, she whittled divining rods out of willow branches, collected pond snakes and bullfrogs, let them go in the house; she dangled my mother's wedding ring by a string over her pregnant belly and watched its revolutions. That spring, nature mirrored twins—twinned clovers, cattails, yolks in breakfast eggs. Kim observed all that doubling in the natural world. Twins, she had said, but nobody listened. When they pulled Suzy out, they thought she was dead. Then she coughed. Suzy had to stay in the hospital incubator for a month, and I was taken back to the Red House.

My father wrote Richard Warren Hatch, telling him of Kim's prophecy, our births, and the mysterious twinned vegetables and flowers they had found around the house. Hatch responded:

We have researched the available records and find that although the Hatches did their duty of not letting the line die out, they do not seem to have produced any twins. . . . It would seem that the guardian haunting spirits of the place have accepted the Messers as one of the family—this being a subtle matter of the spirits' evaluation of the Messers' character and, most especially, of the Messers' sentiment towards the place. It was obvious of course when the Messers produced twins that they were putting their mark upon the place; so what could be more natural than that, in order to show approval and acceptance, everything else should emulate the Messers? It all adds up—not to jinxes—but to a favorable omen and a very important one.

Richard Warren Hatch's Puritan ancestors would have believed in omens; no matter how “good” a person was, he or she

still might not be “elect,” or saved. Only God knew, and believers were left with a collection of oblique and deeply metaphoric symbols to interpret. Hatch's ancestors, in other words (like Kim), would have been looking for signs. My parents, however, were only looking to belong—their own kind of “election”—hoping that Richard Warren Hatch and the house would accept them.

Eventually, Hatch began referring to my father as his “care-taker” and “personal physician . . . on whom [his] fate and Ruth's depends.” He sent my parents a series of letters he called “Red House Notes,” detailing the restoration he had done to the property and what, if anything, my parents might want to continue fixing. “Don't let any restorer lead you to forget that the object is not to recreate a mid-17th century house—a museum,” he wrote early on. “A house grows and changes. Restorers are too often obsessed with what they conceive to be the ‘original'—but no family continued living in an ‘original' unless they were bankrupt—which the Hatch land-owners and mill-owners certainly were not.” This letter detailed ten suggestions having to do with windows, fireplaces, fuses, circuits, and heat. He also suggested a plumber and an oil service the way a householder might direct a house sitter, Cellar under study: Windows should be kept open during summer months but closed in winter. One such letter described each room of the house and Hatch's impressions. Dining room: “no change.” Front parlor: “no change.” Front hall: “no change.”

Slowly objects began to return to the Red House. My father would visit Richard Warren Hatch, and Hatch would give him a book, a document, or a piece of furniture, saying, “Take this back to the house.” Most of the documents were receipts and daybooks that Hatch had found in the attic when he inherited the house. A receipt for a church pew, six cords of wood, twenty-one bushels of salt, fifteen bushels of Indian corn; receipts for medicine, eight doctor visits, bloodletting; a petition to build a bridge across the North River; tax receipts for 1790 and 1796; a bill of sale for a quarter-interest in the “good sloupe” Sally Board; receipt for the boarding of a school teacher, eighteen dollars; a contract to build a church.

And he continued to hand my father things: a stack of books that had belonged to his great-grandfather, Stiegel glass, a broken wooden plate, a pewter plate and fork, a carved plover, an alphabet sampler, four old bottles, a half-model of a ship, twin beds, a drop-leaf table, one twenty-gauge double-barrel shotgun, a Fox Sterling rifle.

Finally, Hatch gave my father Walter's will from 1681, the probate records of Walter's inheritance from his father, and family diaries and letters. According to my father, Hatch emphasized that these documents had always been with the house and that they “belonged there,” as if the house were the rightful owner.

My father hung the framed wills and documents exactly where they had always been; he put the rest of the documents in the parlor closet and shut the door.

Walter

1647–1699

Southeast Massachusetts , 1775

I, Walter Hatch have two cows “Cari” and “Paci” and one heifer that's called Gentle and one steer calf, and a sword and a belt and in consideration of this William Hatch has one pair of oxen called Spark and Golden—

I, Walter Hatch have one black coat, two black doublets, one red waist coat, one broad axe and one hatchet, in consideration thereof William Hatch has one (stuff) suit, one pair of breeches, three tables, two axes and the hoe—

I, Walter Hatch have the iron mortar and pestle and the wheat sieve and the spade and dungfork and instead thereof, William Hatch has one pail, one spit, one pair of shears, and a rake and a hayfork and a shufell (shovel).

—Probate agreement between Walter Hatch and his brother, William, dividing the estate of their father, Elder William Hatch, November 1651

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When Walter returned to Two Mile, he carried his belongings up the North River on a long, flat barge called a gundalow. Family history speculates that four years probably passed between Walter's marking the land and his completion of the Red House. When his father died suddenly in November 1651, Walter had been married to Elizabeth Holbrook for a year and a half, and the house would have been nearly finished.

At the funeral, gloves, scarves, and rings had been given to mourners, the body washed and “laid out,” wrapped in a linen cape dipped in beeswax, tied at the feet. The coffin: a red or black body-box with the date of William Sr.'s death—1651—stamped in nails on the top. In this, Walter's father was carried aloft in the arms of the pallbearers, his friends and sons, out of the crepe-strewn parlor to the back of a wagon drawn by horses harnessed with black ribbons and death's-heads fixed on their forelocks. Or carried to the burial ground by foot through the snow, the line of mourners balancing the coffin on shoulders or with straps, some bearing black arm bands, fans and bonnets, gloves or hats, or black ribbons tied to canes. There was gunfire along the way—a salute to such a decent freeman, a merchant, church elder—and rum and cider were passed around to those who stood at the grave.

After the funeral, Walter had drawn up an inventory dividing the household items with his younger brother, William Jr.—the cows, the sword, the red waistcoat, the oxen, the breeches, the shovel. But when William Jr. died suddenly a few months later, the inventory became moot; Walter got everything except his father's house, which went to William Jr.'s daughter.

So Walter was setting up housekeeping now, gundalowing

up the river with a few items he'd acquired himself: a wooden document-chest marked “W.H.,” a silver tooth- and ear-pick shaped like a sea monster. And everything living he'd inherited—four cows, two oxen, one horse, one pig, two piglets—and everything inert—rugs, curtains, nails, trundle bed, door lock, cow bell, ladders, spoons. All of it traveling with the river's tide, or pushed along by wind, the small sail on the bow, Walter guiding with long poles pushed off the banks.

It would have taken several trips. The center of Scituate , the rows of house lots along the harbor where Walter had spent

his teenage years, was north of the river's original mouth. By bird flight, the diagonal southwest trajectory to Walter's land spanned only eight miles. But Walter had to carry his belongings in an oxcart along an ill-graded road to Bisbee's ferry, then pole it all up the river. The bird, flying from the harbor, would have passed over farms and houses of South Scituate , a corner of Norwell; it would have passed over the river that wound north from the ocean, then west, then south. From the air the river would have looked like a piece of string thrown down from a loom, squiggled and contrary on the floor. Two Mile lay where the river turned sharply from west to south, narrow and curved slightly like an arm extending to pick up the string.

Elizabeth, Walter's new wife, would have made one of these trips, sitting square in the middle of the gundalow on a trunk that held her belongings from her old life and what she would

need for her new—a “marriage portion,” as they called it. Unlike most of the Scituate population (who hailed from County Kent , England ), Elizabeth was the daughter of a Welshman; she had a mother named Hopestill and a grandmother named Experience. When Elizabeth married Walter, she was nineteen years old; she was perhaps twenty now, when the gundalow reached the edge of the Two Mile land.

All but the swath of meadow and some salt hay by the river was covered with forest. Walter and Elizabeth would have wheeled the oxcart into the woods. Walter's land abutted the sunken “ancient” road that had been used by native trappers. The road wound by the marsh and followed the river toward Pembroke and Hanover, eventually connecting to the Plymouth Coast Road to Boston . Walter built the Red House some distance back from this road, sitting half a mile east of the river, near Two Mile Brook.

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Because there was no brickyard, Walter would have built his first chimney out of clay and wattle and daub, the way birds spit and fit nests together. Walter must have framed the house with the help of others, fitting the posts and beams together, then pushing them vertically into slots in the groundsill. The largest framing member, the summer beam, would have extended out of the top of the chimney and across the ceiling of the chamber. The men would have fitted smaller beams into the summer, perpendicular, like ribs along the backbone of a whale. Then they'd hoist story posts, prick posts, side-bearers, and girts, fitted into notches as they built upon each other, and raised up as if out of sleep, the skeleton of the house against the tree line. Then the men climbed on the back of the house and laid on rafters, thatched the roof with reeds from the river. Below, others sliced Two Mile timber vertically into wide boards and then planked the walls with it, edge to edge. Floorboards were fitted on, and

clapboards or shingles, a few windows of oiled paper or leaded glass brought over from England .

For all this Walter would have used a ripping chisel, a draw knife, a jack plane, a hatchet, the hands of other men.

The words they spoke: “tusk,” “tenon,” “beveled shoulder.”

“Freeman,” they said, “neighbor.” Slot and groove, the house went up.

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A householder now, Walter carried the heads of squirrels and birds, light as shoemakers' awls, from his land in Two Mile to the meetinghouse; he carried hinges, door clates, nails back from the ironworks—and with these he fastened doors. The squirrels traveled above him in the trees, migrating in huge chattering herds. A flock of pigeons flew by, blackening the sky with their bodies.

When finished, the Red House would have been quiet inside, insulated against wind, and smelling of dirt and new wood. It was half a house at first—just one room or two. Most settlers constructed houses with a one-room plan—fireplace at one end, door at the other, summer beam like a giant minus sign stretching between the two. Houses started this way—a cellar scraped in earth, a parlor and hall, a lean-to kitchen, perhaps a second-floor loft chamber at the top of a ladder. If Walter had money enough, he would have fitted the space above the door with two round bull's-eyes of greenish glass, letting a little more light shine in.

Elizabeth would have busied herself making soap from lye and tallow, or cooking over the fireplace hearth, which was big enough to walk into and strung with iron pots. Light from the fire would have cast shadows over the long-handled pans, the flax wheel, a row of apples strung from the ceiling. Elizabeth cooked meat on spits or in rounded tin reflector ovens. She used a clamshell in a split stick for a large spoon, cupped another shell

in her hand as a skimmer in the milk pail. Gourds became bowls, dippers, bottles. A turkey wing became a hearth brush, a hemlock branch, a broom. The fork had not yet been invented. Walter ate the meat with his hands off a wooden plate. His left hand held the meat while his right hand cut with the knife; he used the pointed end of the knife to convey the food from the plate to his mouth. Because the meat was flavored with saffron, Walter's left hand would have been stained bright orange.

The meat, butchered in large chunks, was carved away from the bones, which were thrown with other refuse outside the kitchen door. Broken plates lay a few feet outside the door, picked over by pigs and chickens, walked over and crushed by boots entering and exiting. Dogs, or children with sticks, dug shallow pits in the dirt.

In winter, vast geographies of heat and cold shifted from one side of a room to another, an aesthetic of extremes. The family stood scorch-faced before the fire, while the rest of the room to their backs filled with frost, clouds of breath. Pies and meats froze in the corner a few feet away, stayed that way all winter. The Hatches stoked the fire, built it high with logs and walked out of the house to travel to the meetinghouse, riding together on a horse or in the oxcart, or walking with blankets thrown over their heads. They arrived at the meetinghouse, which was never heated, the floors covered with sand; they stood and witnessed a baptism where the minister broke the ice in the christening bowl, and the child, just a few days old, wearing only a bearing cloth, was held up by the women who had assisted the birth.

Only women would have helped with childbearing, the midwife if she could be fetched in time. Certainly there was no doctor yet, and no one would have known the mother's condition—one or more babies, a boy or a girl. They could have done divinations, as was popular, the way some young women carved the skin off an apple in one long tail and flipped it over their shoulder to see what letter it fell into on the floor behind them, the initial of their future love. They may have watched the shape of an egg yolk dropped into a drinking cup. A monster birth, of course, would have prophesized something horrible about the mother—that she was ungraced or, worse, a witch. And many infants were born dead, or “died of baptism,” perhaps from being exposed to the cold or the ice water; they were carried home and then buried a few days later. If they survived, they were placed in hooded cradles by the fire, or carried up ladders to second-floor lofts clutching gold or silver in their hands as was the ritual for wealth, with a scrap of scarlet cloth draped on their heads for luck. These same women may have continued the folk rituals with the older children, tying deer's and wolf's teeth around their necks for strength, rubbing an osprey bone over their gums to ease teething. In the morning and evening, they would make the children stand before the fire hearth, naked except for their long shifts, anoint their joints with snail water, and place snails on their legs and elbows to cure rickets.

Elizabeth had eight children in eighteen years: Hannah, Samuel, Jane, Antipas, Bethia, John , Israel , and Joseph. All but Hannah lived into adulthood. Each slept with its parents until another baby came, and then was placed with siblings in the trundle beside the larger bed, later in rooms off the kitchen, or on the second floor, or in the kitchen itself in fold-down beds or pallets. Until the age of six or seven, male and female children wore the same clothing—long gowns, resembling their mother's dress, that tied at the neck and wrists, with caps on their heads trailing ribbons.

By the time all of Walter's children were born, there were still only six stagecoaches in England, one private coach in Boston; paper money would not be used for another twenty years. Elizabeth died before her youngest child was four years old. She had lived to hear about the plague in England , the London fire; she had survived Scituate 's own smallpox epidemic, and there had yet to be an Indian War. She barely made it to forty.

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The shipyard at the base of Bell House Neck, where Walter worked with his cousin Jeremiah, had no work house, only a series of flat rocks set into the bank of the North River that supported the building of a hull. Behind the landing, a hill rose to a cleared crest where a large iron bell hung between two posts. The bell acted as an alarm; during hostile Indian attacks, the shipwrights, or a neighboring farmer, would run to the top of the hill and ring the bell, which could be heard over the entire valley.

Later, Walter would build mills along the Two Mile Brook, creating a string of four ponds. These mills would support the shipbuilding industry and provide work and goods for many others. Yet the men who worked for Walter and Jeremiah were paid in food—bushels of corn, candles, butter, sugar, cheese. The first ships launched out of the shipyards on the North River were named Swallow, Desire, and Industry.

From his arrival in Scituate until his death sixty-five years later, Walter remained essentially British. Having spent his entire childhood in England , he spoke like an Englishman, used the crown's money, and dressed in a doublet, waistcoat, and breeches. He came into adulthood in a town racked by weather and disease; Quakers were beginning to preach and be persecuted; Harvard College was chartered; and, in England , Charles I was beheaded.

As town constable, Walter was responsible for errant animals and misguided people—public drunkenness, predator bounties, entries in the “Animal Book.” He was the town cop, appointed by law to walk the dirty streets carrying a six-foot brass-tipped staff, calling out the time of night and the weather: 7 o'clock and cloudy skies; two o'clock and fair winds.

In town, the animal tax increased and householders were expected to bring six more blackbird heads into the meetinghouse

at the beginning of planting season. Here townspeople recorded the description of their animals that ran in the large common herd. The animals were known also by their earmarks, the specific notch an owner had carved in their ears. The earmarks always resembled something else: a swallow's tail, a half-moon, a penny. For example, on February 29, 1659 , Walter listed his horse in the Animal Book, a bay gelding. His descriptions joined the town's already lengthy list of horses: mouse-colored, blackish, roan, bay, red; horses with stars, stripes, a white ring just above the hoof, feathers in the forehead. For a marking, Walter chose a short horizontal line curving into a vertical cut that lopped off the bottom third of the ear. His earmark looked like this:

One can imagine that Walter helped others earmark—someone held the horse or cow, while another placed a hand at the base of the ear, working the knife. Still another man may have held the animal by the neck, his hand over the muzzle to keep it from throwing its head back. Then the knife would be turned sharply, bringing a short perpendicular cut to the edge of the ear; the piece of flesh would fall to the ground as the wound was cauterized with a hot iron stake. When Walter found a sheep or cow with its throat ripped out by wolves, he would check the earmark first to see if he knew the owner.

While Walter walked the streets, wolf packs patrolled the swamp, alone or in pairs at the edge of timber, jogging in their lanky, side-winding way. Colonists identified these scruffy, golden-eyed creatures by their markings—black wolf, gray wolf, she-wolf with pup.

Cattle and sheep running in large herds together through low fields and on “the commons” were easy prey for wolves. The ground was marked up with hoofprints as if a giant patterned

carpet had been laid down. Seen at one end of town and then the other, the herd animals grouped beneath trees, or at the riverbank. The patterned carpet shifted over itself across the commons, as if it were its own entity, hundreds of invisible hooves. The only animals, it seemed, that could defend themselves against wolves were goats and hogs. They traveled in smaller groups, and stuck to the thick underbrush in the woods.

Many people believed that the wolves were not merely predatory animals but familiars—shape-shifting imps that acted out the devil's whims. Familiars, the devil's helpmates, usually took the form of animals, Indians, or women. Accusations of witchcraft also included the human ability to change into an animal—a bird, a pig, a black dog, a wolf. A traveler walking along Walton's Creek heard the sounds of hoofbeats behind him, but when he turned, nothing was there. Some heard laughing at the edge of a glade, or the sound of musket fire and the stampede of many ghost horses.

Drunkenness, it was believed, started everything—bred hoodlums, swindlers, rogues. Scituate had passed its first sumptuary law in 1633, which allowed “wine, strong water, or beire” to be sold only in taverns or inns. But people brewed alcohol in private. Those who “could not follow their calling” stumbled through the shadow-boxed semblance of town. They passed out on the commons or slumped by the swine pen, behind the house of a neighbor, to be found later in the evening in ill health, taken in, and reported the following morning for public intoxication, then brought up on charges and fined. In order to avoid fines, residents began wearing masks when searching out or buying alcohol, fornicating, skipping church service, or engaging in other dubious activity performed while drunk. One can imagine groups of drunken revelers yelling behind the false grins or scowls of masks, hoods thrown over their heads.

Given the town's high consumption of alcohol, Walter was often drawn into drunken fisticuffs and other conflict. In 1652,

George Russell was fined three pounds for abusing “the Constable of Scituate in the execution of his office.” Three pounds was not a small sum—Walter had bought his 260-acre home site in Two Mile for five pounds, and forty years later Russell would leave five pounds a year to his widow as her yearly income from his estate. In 1654, William and Elizabeth Randall were brought to court for attacking Walter in the line of duty and drawing blood. “When [Walter] strained for the magistrates table, [the] wife tore the detresse out of his hand, and hurt his hand soe as blood was sheed.”

Eventually, Scituate 's wolf problem became so bad that bounties were posted and hunting parties appointed to flush the wolves out of swamps. With the increased bounties came independent bounty hunters—freemen from other townships, or native trappers. Most of them were wandering hunters who manipulated townspeople by bringing heads to the constable, receiving the bounty, then burying the carcasses, only to return at night to unearth them and sell the heads the next day to another town.

In order to prevent wolf-head swindling, Walter, in his position as town constable, began cutting the ears off bounty wolves. But bounty hunters dug up the ears as well. Eventu-

ally, the town began nailing the skinned wolf heads and half-dried skulls to the side of the meetinghouse, which became the clearinghouse for animal head-taxes, earmark records, notices of town meetings, the sale of livestock, and other announcements. The meetinghouse, with its oiled-paper windows and gray and moss-covered clapboards, fluttered with paper ordinances, a list of nos and don'ts: No adultery, no theft. No selling or lending boats, gear or guns to the Indians. No profane swearing

or cursing. No removing or defacing landmarks. No burning fences. No embezzlement or forging deeds. No reproaching the Marshal. No lying. No playing cards or dice. No denying the scriptures. No skipping public worship, making seditious speeches against the government. No smoking tobacco. No failure to ring swine.

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It was here, more than twenty years after Elizabeth died, that Walter may have seen a paper scrap on the meetinghouse wall announcing that his son Israel was intending to marry Elizabeth Hatch, his mother's namesake, a second cousin. Israel still lived with Walter, and now, after so much had changed—the oldest son, Samuel, gone to work in the mills and the second son, Antipas, now crippled—the Red House would fall to him, the intended soon-to-be-married. Israel had asked her, and she had said yes. The wolf heads, some earless, some bleached, dried on the side of the meetinghouse among the many flapping declarations. When the skin pulled away from the skull, the heads, with their blank eye sockets, resembled masks—the exposed teeth forming a snarl and a grin at the same time.