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have responded, “Taste my steel, Ananias!” Women sweated through childbirth. Children played war games under sturdy tables and rickety chairs. Goodwives and their modest daughters bled and bandaged the mangled bodies of amateur soldiers.
    Ephraim Curtis, the practiced woodsman, crawled and ran thirty hellish miles—the first American Olympian—to get troops and supplies from Marlborough. This was life without God’s protection, the life Brookfield had begun to take for granted. Nipmuc constructed a rolling fire spreader, a travois of barrels and shafts and wheels, and rolled the huge, blazing weapon right up to the house. Suddenly, histories tell us, a freak rainstorm rose up and put out the fires. God tests us a bit at times, but He listens; His children, seeing in the rain providential purpose, prayed for strength to survive His blank indifference. Major Simon Willard, riding at the head of his force of healthy troopers, arrived in partial fulfillment of colonists’ prayers. The Major and his men checked the encampment’s badly burned fortifications, salvaged what could be reused from vandalized houses and barns, then advised abandonment and relocation.
    A continent of opportunity is a continent of cruelty. They had known that when they came; they hardened themselves to the message so long as they stayed in sight of Boston Harbor and the waters that separated them from the shame-fulness of English history—but they’d forgotten. Now God had rededicated them, praise His name. Devastation exfoliates providential efficacy. Suffering is good, though sometimes confusing. Brookfielders—no more this Quabaug nonsense—scattered to sturdier Puritan garrisons.
    Robert and Susannah Fitch settled in a modest, two-storied house on Herbert Street in Salem, bringing with them Hannah, the somber orphan, the living reproach to any forgiveness, any mission to the savages, and Thomas, their newly crippled, aborigiphobic son.

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    SALEM FORCED on the farming Fitches professions suitable to a port town. The wharves were raucous with sailors, settlers, whores and drunks. The world’s races were represented, and a mini-congerie of languages. Spanish and French coins were in circulation; it mattered little which regal head graced the ducat. The finished products of the civilized world were being unloaded in Salem, while holds were stuffed with barbarian ballast, lumber and hides and salted foodstuffs for the journey home. Easy livings could be made for the tough and the imaginative. A successful merchant or barrister or doctor had to live the role, had to command respect of common men and foreigners, or else he invited gossip, envy and challenges to his authority. In any event, it was still a fragile outpost rooted in free will and high sentence; no wonder its self-proclaimed virtues decayed to conspiracy and gossip among the backward elements.
    As the rich got richer they grew cosmopolitan, at least by colonial standards, and slightly ashamed of their Nonconformist, fanatical origins. It was no longer possible for the virtuous to look about them at their fellow Bay Colony citizens and recognize, let alone assert, as their fathers and grandfathers had, their commonality. The wealthy sought instead to perpetuate their good fortune through their sons’ education at Harvard and their daughters’ distinguished marriages. London styles in dress and barbering led the Bay Colony by no more than three sailings: description, orders, delivery with local tailors to confection milady’s silks, velvet for milord, wigs and lace for both.
    But for the dispossessed from the country, for the veterans of Indian raids, demented survivors of scalpings, and for the families who’d never climbed even the first plateau of New World riches that had been promised them, the townsfolk’s backsliding to worldliness and ostentation seemed little better than Catholicism of the English or Roman variety. Purity was no longer valued as the end of human effort,