Response #3: Captivity

Mary has been captured. Her home, her family, her town and her friends are burning to their demise and she is dragged away by her hair, pulled through icy waters and muddy swamps. Captured, really, or saved? She recognizes him; maybe he visited her before her town was destroyed; maybe he was a suitor; maybe he has hurt her before, roughing her u for his pleasure. But is he really a bad guy if he’s dragging her away from death? His language was “not human,” so not Russian, or Spanish, or Chinese. Is he an alien, does she mean? More likely he communicates nonverbally and his actions show his inhumane tendencies—he’s probably the kind of guy who works in the slaughterhouse, chuckling as cows moo for their lives. When she is safely on her feet she recalls “we must march.” Their guns jabbing their backs, urging them forward on the frozen ground, maybe shoeless, maybe not. Her baby, crying for food and love, could not be quenched. Instead, he was fed from acorns, taken away from his mother to be raised is a mob with the rest, lacking the specialized attention only a mother has the patience to give. After all he had taken away, how could she trust him? “I told myself that I would starve before I took food from his hands” she threatens. But who would it hurt other than her wailing son? “I did not starve.” Her captor took care of her, hunting for her, giving her the meat of an unborn fawn while he ate her dead mother (see, a slaughterhouse worker). He freed her from the chains around the tree, marking her as a prisoner. Suddenly, the birds screech, shadows of disappointed angels swarm the landscape around her, enacting God’s wrath. She could have stayed a slave, but instead this man, her…husband is he now?... has disillusioned her and muddied her morals. He controls the men around him, the autocrat of the assembled gang, and her baby is now “fed of the first wheat.” She dwells in a home of imported luxuries, blessed to lay her head on a pillow every night. Mary sees her betrayal, an outsider of a circle to which she once belonged. Her husband’s fame tore her from the ones who shared her same journey—the ones forced to move on and forge a new life. Even in colonial New England, money and fame couldn’t buy a woman’s happiness.