Terror to the Wicked by Tobey Pearl

Author:Tobey Pearl [Pearl, Tobey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

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The Irish defendant’s insistence that the king of England provide him a lifeline would have bewildered and intrigued the commonsense jurors. The daily life of a juror such as Edward Foster, a farmer, was filled with very different concerns, although he was also vulnerable to repercussions from the trial.

On any other day, Foster likely would have been tending his crops or hunting, maybe taking aim at the slender blackbirds that nimbly perched on early green stalks of rustling corn. The birds cocked their heads, their golden eyes alert to his presence, onyx-sheened wings ready for flight. For every shot Foster took, hundreds of black birds would rush skyward. The flutter of wings above rang out along with the sounds of his musket.

Foster spent his days searching for quarry through dense rows of corn he had hand-seeded alone, not having a son old enough to help him. There was no pleasure in killing a small bird that was not worth eating. The problem was the corn; he needed it to survive. The birds would not leave it alone, eating away his crops. The tribesmen nearby used a different technique, setting up “little watch-houses” in the rippling green fields to shelter their older children, who were at the ready to jump out in the early daybreak hours and scare the millions of chogan euck (blackbirds) away from their staple crop. But even if he had had a son old enough to do it, Foster would not have risked a precious child to such work.

He had already lost one son, Timothy, named for Foster’s father. The young boy passed away before his first birthday, triggering the singular grief of such a loss. But just recently, as the corn began to break the soil, his next son was born. Again Foster named him Timothy, determined to provide a namesake for his aging father. Already this boy languished with the illnesses that circulated through the colony. Soon enough religious leaders prayed “for ye healing of a bloody cough among [the settlers’] children.”

The worried settler must have feared that death stalked him. Praying and working represented his only ballast against tragedy. Foster learned from the Indians, who lived close by, how to work the soil and grow the corn his family needed. He diligently planted several shad fish deep in the soil throughout his morgens, or acres, of land on Scituate’s Second Cliff. He knew that without the fish, the unfertilized corn would not grow.

For Foster, despair competed with optimism. His marriage to Lettice, a strong woman, proved a good one. Lettice’s uncle, Timothy Hatherly, known as the “father of Scituate,” had financed much of the growth of the small settlement, part of Plymouth Colony, where they lived. The wedding marked a noteworthy occasion, with the colony’s renowned military captain, Myles Standish, officiating at the civil ceremony. The young couple built their bare-bones clapboard house next to the languorous “Satuit” Brook, facing Kent Street, the main thoroughfare. The residents had followed Cato’s cardinal rules for colonization: “Secure…pure air, a fresh navigable river and a rich country.

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