One Sunday I walked across the peat bog between the town and the coast near where the diggers lived in mean little rows of thatched cottages built of peat blocks. Year after year they dug their slabs of black peat for fuel, and sold their own land, brick by brick, right out from under themselves. Some diggers replaced the overlying clay, mixed it with sand hauled from a beach and refuse from a town to make a soil suitable to grow buckwheat. But it was hard work and took a long time, so others just allowed the pits they had dug to fill with water, leaving straight raised pathways between them. It seemed to me that this practice was only making the land more habitable for frogs, not men. I heard water seeping and sucking everywhere. Soon the peat colony would be indistinguishable from the tidal marshes along the great estuary.
I stopped to watch coots poking their beaks into the mud, a teal preening, marsh hens building their nests in the marram grass, and became conscious of a bird call different from the throaty grunt of the coots. It was more like the honk of a wild goose. Across a large pond Aletta had crouched behind some osiers, her skirts hiked up to avoid the mud, baring her legs to her thighs. She wore no knit black stockings like other women, so her milky skin against the mud gave me a pleasurable shock. The sky was too gray to give back an inverted figure in the pond water, which I thought a shame. With her hands cupped at her mouth, she made the bird call again, urgent and wild and yearning. My soul stirred with the stirrings of her hair. I meant to walk on and enjoy my solitude, but an inner movement seized me and I circled the pond and came up behind her.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Get down,” she whispered, and yanked my arm. “I saw a stork here the other day, and I want to see if he’ll come again. They bring good luck, you know. If you can get one to eat out of your hand, you’ll never go hungry.”
I snickered.
“Don’t laugh at something you don’t know about, Student. If one nests on your roof, you’ll get rich. I know. I grew up on Ameland Island.”
My amusement at the simple certainties of her universe inflamed the little “x” on her cheek. She let down her skirts, tugged her sea-colored shawl around her, her proud breast rising and falling in pique, and walked off a ways, her pretty pout pushing out her lips. “You’ve ruined it now, you noisy boy.”
“Then come with me for a walk.”
She didn’t move so I went on by myself, disappointed. Soon I saw a white bird wading on long black legs. “Aletta,” I called. “Here’s a stork.”
She came crashing through the marsh grass splashing us both with muddy water. “Oh, that’s only an old spoonbill. No black wing feathers. No red legs.” She followed me now along the thread of pathway near the diggers’ colony.
The deckhouse of a sailing barge protruded above the dike of the Damsterdiep on its way to deliver peat to Groningen. “What’s going to happen when they dig up so much peat that their own houses sink into the bog?” I asked.
“Move somewhere else.”
“You don’t get the point. There has to be a better way.”
“Meantime, they’ve got to live.” She pulled out some osiers right in front of someone’s cottage and used them to whisk the air free of insects as we walked. She was close enough now that I smelled her blown hair salted with sea wrack.
We followed the Damsterdiep under the elms. She fascinated me with dark stories her grandfather told her, about shipwrecks and sailors and women cursed to sail with them forever, never putting foot on land, but tied to bowsprits when the ships came into ports. Her great-great-grandfather, she claimed, was the lighthouseman, Varick, of the Ameland light across the Wadden Sea. He got rich, she said, by sending out false signals so trading ships would run aground in the shallows and he’d collect their goods in a skiff or wade out at low tide and pick them up. She told it without shame, and with what I took to be an admiration for his cleverness. She told how sailors’ wives made a healing froth by soaping the skull of a person who died violently, mixing it with two spoonsful of human blood, a little lard, linseed oil and some Java cinnamon. She showed me a nutshell she wore on a string filled with spiders’ heads to ward off fevers. I saw only the smooth skin on which the nutshell rested. When she cautioned me to place my shoes upside down at night like she did to frighten away witches, I laughed, which made her eyes narrow and reveal a darker spirit. Although it all struck me as quaint and engaging, I could see that the poor girl was haunted by a hundred demons.
At the drawbridge over the Damsterdiep I stopped to study the mechanism. Bridges, windmills, locks and dikes had fascinated me since boyhood, and I marveled out loud how they all worked together in a system of integrated parts.
“It doesn’t matter how they work,” she said. “When the waterwolf wants to come up over those dikes, he’s going to, and no pile of mud and seaweed is going to stop him.”
I was undaunted. We crossed the Damsterdiep, and at the Farmsum mill, with the miller’s permission, I showed her how drainage mills worked. In the province of Groningen they were mostly screw mills, lifting water on an enormous, sheathed Archimedean screw placed at an angle below water level in a deep ditch. She had never been inside a windmill before and so she stood astonished and kept her arms crossed over her chest, afraid to touch anything. When she grasped how the movement of the sails turned each connected part of the mechanism, it gave me a surprising, indescribable happiness.
In explaining it, I realized that the wind shaft wheel had sixty-eight teeth, and the connecting gear post had thirty-four staves at the top wallower as well as at the bottom crown wheel, and the connecting gear at the head of the Archimedean screw had thirty-four also. That meant that for every turn of the sails, the screw turned twice. If its head was made to have only seventeen staves, I reasoned, wouldn’t that mean that the ratio would be one turn to four, and the land could be drained twice as fast? Or with half the windpower? And if the spiral blade on the screw could be wider, that would increase the uptake of water on each turn.
“Not so fast,” the miller said. “You’ve got to consider what wind power ’twould take to lift more water.”
We talked at length while Aletta went off following a duck and her ducklings in the drainage ditch. As a result we got caught in the rain coming home. Rain bubbled up in puddles on the bricks of the square, and where the bubbles broke, Aletta would not step across them even though she wore klompen. It would profane the breath of God to be released up her skirts, she said, her eyes widening in a gravity I found enchanting.
When we came home together, wet to the skin, Rika took me aside. “You’d best mind yourself with that girl, Adriaan. Not a speck of sense. She’d walk over one night’s ice on a dare. You get mixed up with her and you’ll be finding another aunt to house you. If Hubert were here, he’d say the same.”
Church towers, windmill caps, dike roads all afforded views of the flat expanse around Delfzijl. Nothing was hidden, and that made everybody’s business everybody else’s, which was, I realized, just the way they liked it. Rika even kept her curtains open as a display of virtue. The only place Aletta and I could be together unseen was just under the rafters in the church tower, a circumstance that propelled us into an earlier intimacy than what we would have known had we been permitted to walk together Sunday afternoons under the wide sky. Using the church as a refuge was her idea. Since the bell was rung from below, we wouldn’t be discovered, and the church was never locked, she said. I liked her contempt for conventional piety, yet she had a personal code as rigid as any Calvinist’s.
Elevation in a land so flat was a heady feeling, one that nudged aside caution and gravity and worship. Above the narrow strip of the village we felt like stowaways on a ship bound for some pleasure isle that the good people of Delfzijl feared even dreaming about lest the mere thought would sweep them into hell. With her I was in another world, drawn into her being. It became impossible to read in the evenings. The sound of her girlish voice moved me now as surely as the silent voices of sages had months earlier, and
her smell of blacksoap and sweat sent me into tremors of excitement.
Under the holy rafters she met my shy, formal advances step for step, accompanied by grateful, urging noises, until one spring afternoon in the dark church, a flood threatened to crash over me. I drew apart and she laughed in a way that made me feel childish. I gave a little tug to the drawstring on her chemise and discovered, by accident, that she carried a lucky bean between her breasts. I leaned her backwards and kissed the two pink ovals of warm flesh where the bean had pressed. Beneath the layers of gray skirts she wore, she arched up to meet me, pressing, urgent, beyond all bearing. Her thighs opened, and I was lost to any Heaven but Aletta. Aletta. Aletta.
Afterward, I expected her eyes to have a misty distance, searching to see if she needed to feel ashamed. Instead, she straightened her clothing, and said, “Well, so it’s done then.”
“What’s done?”
“You mean to marry me.”
Her simplemindedness knocked all breath out of me. I didn’t say anything, yea or nay. I didn’t have to. Her faith in the bean assured her of whatever it was she wanted to think. The morning I was to show the millwright my drawings of a better mill design, I found it in my breeches pocket. It was the same bean for sure, with speckles, an enormous sacrifice. I was about to throw it out when some tenderness made me put it back in my pocket. It seemed a sort of proferred pledge.
One night not long afterward at Rika’s house, Aletta heard a loud scraping sound and then a crash. She tore through the rooms looking for the reason, and when she found the painting of the girl having fallen off the wall, she screamed and backed away, her breast heaving, and her hands pulling at her hair. Aunt Rika, Uncle, everyone was roused, and Rika made her drink hot milk to calm her. I showed her that the broken cord on the back of the painting had come untwined, but still she would not be consoled. “You watch. Something terrible is going to happen.” Nothing quieted her until I folded her in my arms, which told Rika rather more than I’d intended.
The next morning, Rika followed me outdoors as I left for the millwright’s. “There’s nothing of the Holy Spirit in her, Adriaan.”
“You’re wrong, Rika. There’s nothing but spirit. With such demons chasing her, it’s by God’s grace alone that she even has faith enough to take a breath.” I turned and left, that spirit potent over me as an act of nature.
Our plan for the birth had been to wade at low tide across the Wadden Sea to Ameland Island where she had some rights of inheritance. No one lived in the big house except her deaf old grandfather and his housekeeper. We could stay there until we decided what to do, but it was late November and a gale brought driving rain and we couldn’t cross or even get a herring boat to take us there, and so she made it look like she’d run away, but I knew where she was.
Secretly, a little at a time, she had brought up to the church tower dry straw, a blanket, water, bread, candles and an old basketful of clean rags. Every day as we waited for her time to come, I brought her a crock of ale from the tavern and food that I stole from Aunt Rika’s kitchen. She asked for buttered bread and ewe’s milk cheese to swallow right after the birth, and, to wrap up with the child, she wanted a cabbage leaf in case of a boy and a clump of rosemary in case of a girl. Out of fear to set her raging, I complied. By then, I’d do anything she told me to.
I even watched when she poured molten wax into a bowl of water. When the drops hardened, she laid them in a row to study their shapes. Her face twisted into a torture of grooves and she swept them up in her fist.
“Well? What’s it mean?” I asked, ashamed at my own curiosity about what was only folklore.
“Can’t tell you. It’ll make it true if I tell you.”
It infuriated me that she wouldn’t say. I had lost hold of reason, of all that I’d believed to be true.
She refused a midwife even though I pleaded with her. She said midwives in Delfzijl were all under oath to report any illegitimate births to the town council who might take the child, so I had to do it myself. When it was time, she signaled me by hanging out her shawl from the stone grating up under the eaves and I made some excuse to the millwright and came across the square in the rain. I found her gripping the rafter above her head. “Now don’t you pass out dead cold at what you see,” she said. She told me what to do and I did it. Once she had said she’d never been made love to by a man before me, yet she had an exact knowledge of birthing, and she wasn’t the least bit afraid, which made me wonder, just before the baby came, if it really was her first.
I felt weak with the magnitude of what was before me—the blood, the smell—and what I was holding in my hands—quivering life. “A fine, healthy boy,” I managed to say. Aletta only moaned. I cleaned him up, set him in the basket and had my hands out ready for what she said would slide out next, when she screamed again, the sound muffled by pounding rain. She gave a mighty heave and out came another head. Shaking, I supported it in the palm of my hand.
Twins were the worst kind of omen, Aletta said afterward, and this one, her little lip was split like a cat’s or a hare’s. “The mark of the Evil One’s claw on her surely.”
“That’s nothing of the kind,” I said, with less firmness than I had intended.
I had no choice but to make her as comfortable as possible and go back to Rika’s.
The next day, when I brought her midday supper Aletta said the girl couldn’t suck without the milk coming out her nose. “She’ll live a short life taunted by jeers and she’ll turn mean and wild and then die of loneliness. Better dead already. Better send the poor thing to her Maker before she gets used to life.”
“Aletta, don’t you be thinking such a thing.”
I was afraid to leave her, but I had to go home to avoid suspicion. “You lay one hand against that child and you’ll endanger your immortal soul.” I gave her a hard look and told her not to move from that spot until I came tomorrow. I lay awake all night listening to thunder crack the world.
Hard, driving rain beat on the roof of the millhouse where I worked the next morning on a windmill model, carving a drainage screw with a small gear head and wider blades. I prayed the rain would continue and drown out any babies’ cries that villagers might hear. With more food for her and some milk, I slipped in the side door of the church, tasting the rank odor of mildew, and climbed the wooden stairs in an agony of dread.
The boy was at her breast, her hand behind his little skull. The basket was empty.
“Where’s the girl?”
Aletta, with bitten, swollen lip, fixed on me a fierce glare. “You breathe one word of this, Adriaan, and they’ll stretch a rope around my neck surely.”
“My God, Aletta.”
“What do you know, Student, about a mother’s rights?”
“What about a father’s?”
“You didn’t read the wax drops, Adriaan. I had no choice.”
“Tell me where she is, Aletta.”
She turned her face away. I looked at her hands and saw dirt under her fingernails. Mud had smeared her skirt, her elbow and her cheek.
“Tell me where.”
Her stony coldness was more convincing of the cataclysm than the dirt. Argument was as futile now as blame in Eden. I could not bear to look at her. She had cast away her soul.
Even in this, nature worked against her: She didn’t dig deep enough and rain washed away the loose dirt. The next day townswomen discovered the poor sodden babe in the mud. That sent the aldermen straight to Rika, and my honest aunt told them Aletta had run off. It wasn’t long before they would find her, I knew. In the righteous town of Delfzijl, iniquity was as unable to be hidden as a windmill on a mudflat. “Look in the mills. Look in the barns. Look in the church. She’s bound to be somewhere,” Aunt Rika told Alderman Coornhert, and then she gave me a look of righteous defiance.
A few hours later, Aletta burst through the doorway shrieking, “Adriaan! Mistress! Don’t let them take me.” Fighting the aldermen who seized her, she cried out to me, “Don’t l
et them foam my scalp. Don’t let them, Adriaan. I’m warning you.” She leveled at me a look that paralyzed me, but no one seemed to notice me, and whatever I said was lost amidst her arms flailing against their chests and her hair whipping their faces. They had who they wanted.
I stood dumb and helpless before the door a long time after they left.
“You only think you love her now, Adriaan,” Rika said softly. “There will come a time, though you can’t imagine it now, when you will not be able to remember her face.”
I looked at Rika with her braid wound smugly on the top of her head, not a hair disordered. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I had two beautiful days with the baby in the bell tower. Several times a day and throughout the rainy night, I soaked a corner of Aletta’s shawl with ewe’s milk I got from the millwright’s boy and let the baby suckle it the way I’d seen a farmer do with an orphaned lamb, with his little finger in the lamb’s mouth. I did the same, though I didn’t know how to hold him properly. I tried to remember how Aletta did. When he was satisfied, his wiggly arms flew open, and his blue eyes closed to slits. It fairly split me with joy when his tiny dimpled fist with fingernails like flakes of candle wax performed his first miracle: He grasped my index finger.
By the third morning the babe seemed listless. Gnawing hunger had set in. While I fed him again, the truth I had resisted became clear: I would have to give him to someone who could mother him. I wrapped him in clean rags, settled him warmly in the basket hidden in the bell tower and left to search for someone. It occurred to me as I walked that Descartes had a child by his maidservant in Amsterdam. But Descartes got to raise his child as his own. No house in Delfzijl had a small wooden placard covered with red cloth hanging under the eaves announcing a new baby in the family, but what did it matter? If he were suspected to be Aletta’s baby, no one would take him.