The Serpent and the Hatchet Gang
F. Brett Cox

The serpent in the sea was nothing compared to the serpent in the hearts of men. The serpent in the sea may or may not find you, Esther Lane said, may or may not be there at all. But the corruption in a man’s heart, the malicious weakness that disguises itself as passion and autonomy, then drowns itself and all around it in liquor and violence and failure—that is inescapable. Its effects can be lessened, its power can be curbed, but it can never be banished entirely. Put the men in chains and pour their liquor out on the ground, she continued, and they will still find a way to do you harm. The serpent in their hearts will not be defeated. Better to take your chances with the monster offshore.

Julia Brooks listened attentively. The others, though steadfast in their commitment, were long used to Esther’s grand pronouncements and greeted them placidly, nodding in agreement as they waited for the old woman’s rhetoric to run its course. But to Julia, the youngest among them, Esther’s words flowed like the tide into Sandy Bay, and as they all sat—in three cases, stood—crammed liked netted mackerel into Rachel and Stephen Perkins’ parlor, the temperate July night turned sweltering in such close quarters, she waited eagerly for Esther to continue.

Instead, there was the sound of an elderly throat clearing, and Julia turned with the rest of them to see Hannah Jumper look up from her knitting. “Don’t say that, Esther. The whole point is to pour the liquor out. Ain’t that why we’re here?”

Esther looked momentarily annoyed, but quickly composed herself and said, “Of course, Hannah. I do get carried away sometimes. Of course we remain united in our purpose. Don’t we, everyone?”

They all voiced their agreement. Tonight, only the leaders gathered for one last coordinated review of their plan. But come tomorrow, fully sixty of the women of Rockport, Massachusetts, would bring moral and economic sense back to the community. The half-hearted attempts of the town’s agents to regulate liquor sales had been a miserable failure, and it was now up to the women who bore the worst of the burden, and the handful of men who understood what was at stake, to deal themselves with this public nuisance. No more men lying about in drunken indolence when the winter storms and summer doldrums kept the fishing boats docked; no more backbreaking grocery bills whose main item was rum. No more bruises to hide, Julia thought. No more knowing the back of your husband’s hand better than his heart.

They had been meeting for weeks, in secret. And while Esther’s eloquence kept them inspired, Hannah kept them going. She was not well-spoken, and seventy-five years old in the bargain. But it was she who had called the first meeting, she who had kept record as the conspirators discovered, and chalked, with white X’s that would not be seen by those not looking for them, every spot in Rockport where liquor would be found. It was Hannah who had invoked their Revolutionary ancestors, the twenty women who had banded together some eighty years back and raided Colonel Foster’s supply store in Gloucester after their men marched off to Bunker Hill promising to bring back liberty but leaving their fishing boats idle and their families improvident and shivering. And it was Hannah who convinced them that hatchets were the only sufficient instrument for dispatching, if not the men who defied decency and the law, at least the wretched barrels of rum.

Mary Hale, at thirty-seven the next youngest after Julia, had objected. “Is there not too great a risk of injury? We don’t want anyone to get hurt, do we?”

“Desperate cases need desperate remedies,” replied Hannah, and continued with her knitting.

Now, on the eve of their action, the old woman sat calmly, the motion of her needles and yarn so smooth and continuous it scarcely seemed motion at all. Although she sat to the side, against the wall, the room seemed centered around her.

“But why all this talk of sea serpents?” asked Stephen Perkins, leaning forward from his perch on the edge of the room’s only sofa. “Haven’t we enough to do without digging up all that nonsense?”

“I agree,” said Mary Knowlton. Her husband had enjoyed great success transporting stone south to Boston, prosperity that set her apart from the fishermen’s wives and daughters who filled the room; some were surprised that she had joined enthusiastically in their conspiracy. But when Mrs. Knowlton was Mary Clarkson she had been a schoolteacher, and Julia, one of her students, still remembered the impromptu temperance lectures with which the young teacher would punctuate even a math lesson. “Do we want to be laughed at again? To the rest of the world we might as well have been Indians chasing spirits in the woods, and the nineteenth century might as well never have arrived. What we’re doing is too important—”

“I was scarcely speaking publicly for the Boston papers,” said Esther. “I merely invoked the serpent as a figure to dramatize my point. We’re gathered here, after all, because of the depravity of men—”

“We’re gathered here because of rum,” Hannah said without looking up from her work. “Rum is real. So’s our hatchets. Let’s stick to them.”

“Please, friends,” said Mary Hale, “Hannah, Esther—we’re all here for the same reason. Let us not divide ourselves from ourselves.” She stood and brushed straight the skirt of her grey dress. There were some of the younger matrons in town who had left their Puritan ancestors firmly behind. Betsey Andrews, the current schoolteacher, periodically took the steamboat down to Boston to inspect the latest fashions, while Judy MacQuestion was rumored to own at least one hat imported from Paris. Mary was not among their number: the neatness of her clothing was matched only by its plainness. “Mrs. Knowlton is right. The task before us is too important. Esther, we all admire your eloquence, and are grateful for it. Who of us could have framed the issues so compellingly? How many will there be on the streets tomorrow because of your persuasion?” Esther smiled and nodded her head every so slightly.

“And if Esther’s silver tongue has put people in the streets, it is Hannah’s courage and strength that has put us all in this room. Please don’t worry, Hannah. We know what needs to be done, and we shall do it.”

Hannah did not reply. They all knew by now that, in a group at least, Hannah would speak only to prod forward or to object; her silence testified that the disagreement was settled. Mary sat and smoothed her skirts again.

“Well, then,” said Mr. Perkins. “Are we concluded, then?”

They agreed that, barring unforeseen circumstances, this would be their last meeting; the plan was set and would be implemented tomorrow.

As they adjourned, James Babson, who had kept silent throughout, offered to escort Julia home. As an agent of the Granite Company, Mr. Babson had access to all manner of tools and an income not dependent on the vagaries of the ocean; both made him an invaluable ally. He was also corpulent and ill-kept, and the breath that whistled through two missing teeth was foul. Julia had had to accustom herself to such attentions in the two years since her husband’s ship had returned to port with its flag at half-staff, and she had no real reason to consider Mr. Babson’s offer as anything other than honorable.

Still. “Many’s the time, ma’am, when I saw your late husband, God rest him, with his hand so reverently on your arm as you walked home of an evening. I would be honored to assume that duty—even if only momentarily, this evening,” he added hastily.

Julia instinctively leaned away from him, then steadied herself, sighed, and was about to agree when Hannah stepped in. “Walk home with me, child. I reckon I could use the company.”

Hannah had no more need of company, Julia believed, than did Squam Lighthouse. But she quickly accepted the old woman’s offer and left Mr. Babson standing in the middle of the parlor, Esther heading casually but directly toward him, already talking.

The night felt almost chilly after the warmth of the overcrowded parlor, and Julia pulled her shawl close about her shoulders. Inside, Hannah’s presence had filled the room; outside, her great height remained—Julia came barely to the old woman’s shoulder—but, free of the press of walls and bodies, Hannah seemed reduced, distant. It was like walking with a scarecrow, Julia thought, although a most strong and determined one.

As they made their way down High Street, Julia, still full of the meeting and the righteousness of their cause, reiterated much of the evening’s discussion. Hannah remained silent, her heavy shoes clopping on the cobblestones. When they reached the Inner Harbor, rather than turning right to continue to their respective homes, Hannah stopped, facing the water. Julia followed the old woman’s gaze into the harbor. The fishing boats rested at their moorings, looking like charcoal drawings beneath the dim light of the half moon. They had not been out to sea for over a month. On one of the larger boats, at the outer edge of the harbor, several figures moved around the deck. Julia could not make them out individually, but she heard rough laughter, the shattering of glass, a bellowing voice: “She was mine, damn ya! Who said you could get under her skirts afore me?” More laughter, and the sawing of a fiddle. Although she knew it was impossible at such a distance, she could almost swear she smelled their liquor across the brine.

Julia shuddered. “After tomorrow perhaps we’ll have less of that.”

Hannah stared out past the boats and the profanity. Julia looked up at her. For a moment, the old woman’s face was obliterated by the darkness, and she looked like her bonnet and her dress and nothing else. “They should stay on the boats,” Hannah said. “They should stay on the ocean. They can’t harm the ocean.”

“Maybe the serpent will get them,” Julia said, and then instantly remembered Hannah’s harsh dismissal of Esther at the meeting. “Oh, I know, Hannah, it’s just nonsense, forgive me.”

Hannah said nothing in response. Then she turned sharply away and said, “Long past time we were home, child.”

They proceeded down Mt. Pleasant Street, past Hannah’s house. Julia tried to get Hannah to stop and let her make the remaining short walk on her own, but the old woman refused. As they turned down Long Cove Lane, Hannah asked, somewhat to Julia’s surprise, if the chamomile she had sent to Julia’s Aunt Martha had helped with her digestive difficulties. The women of Rockport paid Hannah to mend their dresses, but far more valuable, and free in the bargain, was the harvest of Hannah’s herb garden. Horseradish for a sore throat, catnip to sleep, pennyroyal for a chill, pipsissewa leaves for the heart.

Julia replied that her aunt was much better and expressed her admiration for Hannah’s skills. “I wish I could cultivate herbs as well as you. I tried planting some rosemary last season and it just didn’t take.”

“Put rosemary close to the high-water mark. It gets its strength from the sea.”

At Julia’s doorstep, Hannah bade the young woman good night. “Rest well, child. You’ll need all your wits about you tomorrow.” Julia promised that she would and watched the old woman retrace her path down the street and disappear around the corner.

Later, with the lamps an hour dark and sleep nowhere close, Julia stood before her open bedroom window. The moon was gone, and the land and the ocean and the horizon were a dark unbroken carpet over the world. But she heard the ocean, and felt it in the breeze that chilled her through her nightclothes, and smelled it. If she opened her mouth, she knew she could taste it.

There was nothing to see, but much to remember. Two years ago next month.

She had heard the stories; everyone had. The summer of 1817, fourteen years before her own birth. Hundreds down in Gloucester, most more reliable than not, had seen it. From Ten Pound Island to Western Harbor they had shielded their children and grabbed their telescopes, or set out in their boats. The reports were almost all the same: fifty to one hundred feet long, thick as a barrel, dark on top, lighter on what of its belly could be seen when it raised itself from the water. A head the size of a horse’s. Some claimed it was segmented; others noted its vertical undulations. It could turn on a dime and raced away when approached. Several had tried to kill it, of course, even as one newspaper suggested they should be grateful to it for driving herring into the harbor.

The Linnaean Society of New England had formed a committee—Harvard men, of course—to investigate, but, being too busy living inside their own heads to come and see for themselves, the committee members had sent a list of questions to the Justice of the Peace with a request for him to interview the witnesses and send them the results.

Things might have held steady at that point, or even faded away, but a couple of months later the Colbeys found a humpbacked snake, over a yard long, on the ground near Loblolly Cove. They killed and examined it, and they remembered one or two people claimed to have seen two serpents in the harbor. Could this be offspring? The Linnaeans got hold of it, dissected it, gave it a Latin name, and declared that, well, yes, it might be kin to the creature in the harbor. But then another Harvard man came along and proved that it was just a deformed black snake.

The next summer there were more sightings in the harbor, and things looked as if they were getting heated up again. But when the creature came up to Squam Bar, near the lighthouse, and a Boston captain chased it down in a whaleboat, only to discover that he had harpooned a horse mackerel, most of Cape Ann was ready to forget anything ever happened. The following year, dozens more saw the same thing just off the shore down at Nahant, but by then the Linaaeans had given up, the Boston captain had disappeared, and people were making fun of the gullible Yankees all the way down to Charleston.

They were all just stories Julia had grown up with, and she didn’t regard them as anything more, or less. And then she saw it herself.

Her husband Joshua had been out with the boats, and she had not been sorry to see him go. The summer doldrums had lasted longer than usual, giving him more time to drink, and curse the fish because they weren’t there, and her because she was. It could have been worse. Abigail Hancock’s husband used her so badly that both the town constables had intervened, and Mr. Hancock, after he sobered up, left abruptly for a rumored family in the Maine woods. But the memories of the young man of promise and passion she had married, against the sullen wreck who stared emptily out at the waves as he swigged his rum, were almost as bad as the bruises she managed most of the time to hide.

Almost. A hundred fifty-seven dollars for nine months’ work was no life for anyone; she understood, felt his entrapment. But he had no right to take it out on her. He had no right to do that.

She had been out on the rocks at Bearskin Neck in the early morning, looking out into Sandy Harbor. She had emptied the liquor as soon as he left and no longer cared how angry he would be when he returned. It was a clear morning and the sun was warm on her face, but the water still looked hard and grey.

She blinked, and felt as if she had just missed something. She looked intently out into the bay, and seconds later it rose up in front of her.

Immediately, she knew what it was. All the stories she had always heard, with all of their divergent details, now merged and came to life not fifty yards in front of her. It was black, and it undulated vertically through the water, and it did indeed seem about as big around as a barrel, and its head did in fact look about the size of a horse’s. Its front end was several feet out of the water, and the sound of its churning and splashing was louder than the tide lapping against the rocks beneath her feet. The serpent splashed and glistened in the sun, and she reached out as if to touch it.

In an unbroken motion, it turned and plunged toward shore. Before she could even consider backing away, it was directly in front of her. It raised itself up from the water, its head level with her own. Its liquid grey eyes regarded her calmly. There was a hissing sound, but not that of a snake; rather of wind blowing through an enclosed space, or her husband’s breath beside her when he slept without drinking.

Her heart felt as if it would hammer through her chest, but she was not frightened. At that moment she had no problems; there was nothing in her life but this wonder. She kept her arm outstretched, leaned forward.

And as quickly as it had come to her, it left. By the time she lowered her arm, it was gone. The water seemed scarcely disturbed. She turned away and went back through town to her home.

Two days later came the news that her husband was lost.he wept properly at his funeral and gave his clothes away.

She had never told anyone, ever, what she had seen, not even when it had been sighted a week later out from Loblolly Cove, and later that same month further south near Hull. It was not so much that she feared ridicule as that she wanted to keep the event for herself. She had given everything to her family and her husband while they lived, but that moment at Bearskin Cove, that splash of water and shining strange skin, was hers alone. Let the learned men have their theories, and let the foolish men try to hunt it like a whale. For her, the creature was not a disruption of the natural order; it was a reassurance, a guarantee of possibility.

And she so needed that guarantee. When her grandmother had died, she and Joshua had claimed the old woman’s house. (Grandmother had loathed him, thought him beneath her only granddaughter; Joshua swore she had lasted as long as she did solely to keep him out of her home.) Modest as it was, it did for them, and certainly it had for Julia by herself. There was, of course, no pension for a dead fisherman, but there was still a bit left of the small inheritance she had from her parents, and it went farther without Joshua working his way through it a bottle at a time.

But it would not last forever. Sooner or later, Julia knew she would have to choose among gloomy options: join the relatives in Boston whom she barely knew but who had grand visions of her becoming a governess on Beacon Hill; strike off on her own and seek work in the inland factories; or cast her lot with the likes of Mr. Babson. These were not choices; these were sentences for the crime of being a widow.

Now, as she leaned out her open window into the dark, she breathed deeply of the ocean and thought about a new and wonderful possibility: a town without rum. A community of responsible and sober men who cared for their families. Surely in such a place, there would be true choices. She and Hannah and the rest would make it happen. Julia closed the window, buried herself under the bedclothes, and dreamed of swimming with the serpent, giving it sweet herbs from Hannah’s garden.

By nine the next morning, Dock Square was more or less awake. The boats languished in the harbor waiting for July to pass and the winds to return, and the men who were about were already in the taverns. The shopkeepers had their doors open for business and what breeze might come off the harbor. But business almost always came from the women, and as Julia waited in front of Deacon Burns’ shop, there were none anywhere in sight. Here were two men playing checkers in front of Johnson’s Hall hotel; there was a cluster of neighboring merchants discussing the merits of Fillmore’s audacious embrace of the Know-Nothings. An isolated scholar took his leisure near the checker players and perused the latest collection of Mr. Emerson’s essays.

But where were the women? Julia smiled graciously at the merchants and restrained herself from wringing her hands. Where were they?

Then she saw a figure approaching from School Street, and two more down Broadway. Margaret Thurston, two of the Choate sisters. Then a group turned off High Street, Mary Knowlton among them, and more down Broadway, and when Julia looked up Mt. Pleasant she saw Hannah marching across the cobblestones, her hands hidden beneath the folds of her shawl.

As Julia moved to join the women, there was a commotion down past Jim Brown’s shop. She turned and saw what looked like a small battalion moving in her direction, men as well as women. The women marched silently toward Dock Square, but Julia heard the cries of the men: “Watch out! They’re coming for the rum! The women are going for the rum shops! Think they’ll do it? Never in hell! Oh, yes they will, too! Ha! Let’s go! Better hurry, boys!”

They’re coming for the rum? How could these men know? She and the others had gone to such lengths to keep the plan secret. But as Julia saw more women treading resolutely toward the square, marching silently past the shouting men, she had a sudden sense of her own naiveté, and of the scope of what was about to happen. Of course others had found out. Not everyone. But enough. How could they not know what the problem was? How could they not see the ruinous effects of the rum in the idle men, in the drawn and haggard faces of the women? She moved quickly to join the others.

By now there must have been two hundred women on the square. Everyone from the meetings, of course, but plenty of others as well. The younger men stood to the harbor side and jeered. At least one woman, whom Julia did not recognize, complained loudly at being caught up in this lawless mob and swore to head straight for the constable’s office. A few men were now gathered with the women: Stephen Perkins, Newell Burnham, James Babson—the latter of whom, to Julia’s consternation, found her in the crowd, smiled, and tipped his hat. Joe Griffin, who worked for Perkins, waved an American flag.

Julia had expected Hannah to take command, but it was Esther Lane who separated from the crowd and planted herself to speak. Now the men as well as the women fell silent. The sun beat down on their heads as the gulls screamed over the harbor. Julia rearranged her shawl, and prepared for a lengthy discourse.

Esther started to speak, stopped, removed a hand from her shawl to wipe a tear from her eye. Julia marveled at the intensity of the old woman’s face: for once, Esther Lane seemed to be yielding to what she felt, rather than to the sound of her own voice. “We know why we are here,” she said, her voice quavering but loud enough for all to hear. “We are here to take back our town and our families and our lives.” She paused, removed her other hand from beneath her shawl, and held aloft a hatchet. “Not one bottle left!”

In unison, every woman present produced a hatchet from beneath her shawl and raised it high. Every family in Rockport had one, or more—the common land was now mostly sold off to private hands, but most of the fishermen still cut their own wood as best they could from the ever-thinning landscape. To see them all at once, in the hands of these women, took Julia’s breath away. As Joe Griffin waved his flag, Sally Norwood raised the banner she had promised to make: a cotton rectangle she held aloft bore a hatchet in black paint.

Julia held her own weapon over her head. She thought of Joshua and gripped the hatchet tighter. “Not one bottle left!”

With that, Hannah stepped forward beside Esther and shouted, “Let’s get to work!”

The young men who had been so noisy before gaped as the women fell into formation, four abreast, and began their march down the street. Julia tensed when she saw the town’s two constables, who had but recently arrived, but they looked on with the other men, and did no more to stop the women than they had done to enforce the liquor laws.

As they passed by Deacon Burns’ shop, he stood in the doorway, his face twisted with rage. He looked like Joshua used to after a session with the rum, and Julia’s step almost faltered. “Shame!” Burns shouted. “Where are your husbands? Are they men? Shame! There’s nothing here for you! Go home!”

There was a sudden movement from the marching column, and Betsey Andrews darted toward Burns. Julia was shocked to see that the schoolteacher’s latest fashion was a skirt that came just below her knee, exposing light yellow bloomers that ruffled down to her shoes. But the lack of a full skirt left her free to maneuver past Burns while holding a hatchet in each hand. She waved to the women, and as most of the column continued down the street, several broke ranks, shoved the deacon aside, and charged into his shop.

Julia followed them in, and they began rolling barrels out into the street, one after the other: rum, brandy, ale, beer. As Burns screamed and cursed in a manner not befitting a leader of the church, the women took their hatchets and went to work. The young men who had followed them from the Square were now cheering: “That’s it, girls! Have at it! Damn, look at Burns! Better pour some on the Deacon, ladies—he needs cooling off, by God! Serves him right! Hurrah for the hatchet gang!”

Julia tried to weigh in with her own weapon, but there were too many women ahead of her. The aroma of the spilled liquor was overpowering, and she tried in vain to wipe off the rum that had splashed on her dress. She was mortified by the crude encouragement of the young men and unsettled by the gleam in the eyes of the women as they swung their hatchets down, again and again and again, on Deacon Burns’ stock. Their hands were growing bloody, but they did not even seem to notice.

When she heard a voice from inside the shop announce, “That’s the last one,” Julia moved to rejoin the column. The gang now moved as with a mind of its own: several women would peel off to attack a shop or tavern, then rejoin the column as it wound through the streets. They took care of the Stage Coach Inn, the Laf-a-Lot cottage, Johnson Hall. When they got to Jim Brown’s shop, they found him sitting atop a barrel, swearing, daring them to take his livelihood from him. They swept him onto his own front steps, smashed the barrel, and slopped over the foaming ale to get inside. Brown had hidden many bottles, and they found them all.

“Damn you!” Brown cried. “Whores! Devils! What are you trying to do? What do you want? Is this going to makes things better? Will this make the winds blow? Are your hatchets going to fill our ships? Give your men work? I’ll be restocked in a month! We all will!”

They brushed past him and moved on to John Hooper’s basement, reportedly the largest holdings in town. Julia stepped over a man she recognized as one of Stephen Perkins’ crewmen as he lay beneath Brown’s steps and tried to catch the dripping ale in his mouth. Mary Hale, her plain dress drenched with alcohol, evidently thought the man injured. She paused and tried to help him up, but he shoved her away.

And so it went for the rest of the morning. They ceased around noon, lining up to drink from the town pump, and then they resumed their work. They had marked many places with their subtle white X’s, and they dispatched them all. As they moved through the town, the young men following them were joined by children, by dogs. The stench of liquor in the streets was suffocating, made worse by the boiling sun. The women’s dresses were soaked through. With each stop, their eyes grew brighter, their hatchets cut deeper. Their laughter was punctuated by screams that might have been of anger or of joy. Some sang hymns that sounded here and now as rough as the sailors’ chanteys.

Julia had never been so weary in her life. Her dress was ruined; her shoes squished from the spilled liquor. She had marched with the others from the square to Bearskin Neck and back, the fear she had felt at the beginning of the violence turning to exhilaration, and then back to fear as the violence continued, and then finally to numbness. The certainty of their cause, the care of their planning, her ache for a better life for them all—none of that had prepared her for the reality of smashed barrels and broken glass, the curses of the men, the jeers of the boys, the consuming ferocity that possessed the women. The unshielded, naked emotion on both sides. One of the merchants had actually wept as they smashed his bottles of brandy on the cobblestones. She had never before seen a man weep.

And still the women were on the hunt, and still the men did not try to stop them. Not really. She had heard one man shout to anyone who would listen that they should go down to the armory and come back and teach these women a lesson, but another man cuffed him on the head and called him a damned scoundrel. The women moved at will through the town. “Not a bottle left!”

Julia found herself staggering away from the hatchet gang down Long Cove Lane, her head spinning from the heat and the fumes, her hands bloody from her turns at the barrels. She had been unsure at first, and then she had thought about Joshua and the times she had tried and failed to fight back, and then her hatchet sank as deep as anyone’s. Now she was in front of Hannah’s house. Her head was so heavy. Her hands were trembling. It was so hot. Perhaps it would be cooler by the inner harbor. She walked around the house and through the back yard, past the herb garden, to the water’s edge.

The sun was still relentless, but the wind had picked up, and the water was choppy. Julia shook her head as if to stir the air some more. She let her shawl drop from her shoulders. She did not know what had become of her hatchet. Behind her she could still hear the occasional sound of breaking glass, distant shouting. She stepped out onto the rocks. She wanted to be closer to the water.

Which churned, and bubbled, and produced the serpent. No sighting, no warning. The enormous head rose in front of her. The same grey eyes; the same hissing sound. And why not, on this mad day? Julia reached out to the serpent, as she had before. She leaned closer, and her soaked shoes on the slick rocks betrayed her.

The water was shockingly cold, and almost immediately her head struck one of the submerged rocks. Everything went away for an instant, and then she rose out of the water, and above it. The serpent’s skin was like nothing she had ever felt before. She adhered to it without effort; she did not have to try to hold on.

As the serpent moved with her out into the harbor, she wondered dimly where she might be going, but a destination truthfully did not seem all that important. The stench of the liquor had been replaced with something equally strong, but it was the smell of the sea and not the weakness of men or the violence of women. To her still-spinning head, that was a great comfort. Esther’s words came to her from what seemed like some other world: The serpent in their hearts will not be defeated. Better to take your chances with the monster offshore.

They raced through the harbor, plunging beneath the surface for seconds at the time, then rising, then plunging down again. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. Once the serpent paused on the surface and she could see the shore behind her. A figure appeared. A blotch on the horizon, but Julia dimly registered the outlines of a dress, a bonnet. Hannah? Was it over? Had they won? The serpent plunged again, but this time it stayed down. Julia held her breath and closed her eyes against the salt water.

When they surfaced, Julia opened her eyes. She was still facing the shore, but now it was different. The shore was yards and yards away, and yet she saw with perfect clarity as if looking through a telescope whose lens encompassed the whole world. Hannah stood motionless at the water’s edge while behind her the houses, the shops, the cobblestones, all melted away, leaving no trace, leaving only a field of white, an appalling empty whiteness before which Hannah stood frozen like a carving before a piece of blank paper.

The serpent dove again. Julia closed her eyes and prepared to drown.

But when the serpent brought her to the surface she still breathed, and when she opened her eyes Hannah was still there on the shore, and the buildings had returned. Some of them. There was Hannah’s house, and others. But now the telescope lens had become a stereopticon, and she could see past the houses on the shore to buildings she had never seen before, and bizarrely-shaped carriages that moved by themselves, without horses, and men and women dressed in bright colors, with some of the women dressed like men and some in nothing but what appeared to be undergarments. Before it all stood Hannah, still, and Julia heard a voice that was Hannah’s, and was something else altogether. Our victory will outlive us! It will outlive this century, and the next!

The serpent was gone. Julia had never been particularly adept in the water, but she floated comfortably, without difficulty. She would not have noticed if fifty serpents had appeared. She did not know what she saw, but she knew that within this impossible scene was a cleanliness, a tolerance, a prosperity beyond anything she could ever have hoped, and at the same time a danger, an inexplicable poison that frightened her to the bone. There were options after all. It made no sense at all, and it made perfect sense.

Julia shut her eyes against the salt and the sun and the knowledge, good and bad, which overwhelmed her. She felt a hundred miles from shore and wondered if Joshua lay somewhere beneath her. She thought how pleasant it would be to remain floating there, like a leaf, like a hatchet, away from women and men.

When she opened her eyes again, the strange buildings and machines and people were gone, and so was Hannah, and her town as she knew it spilled down to the water’s edge. She felt a gentle pressure on her back grow more insistent. She tried to keep floating, but soon her heels dragged the bottom, and she was returned to the shore.

Julia looked back to the water. The serpent was gone. So she turned and made her way over the rocks and across the yard and went back to the options that awaited, to the triumph and the wreckage of her town.

For “The Serpent and the Hatchet Gang,” I’m deeply indebted to Eleanor C. Parsons’ Hannah and the Hatchet Gang: Rockport’s Revolt Against Rum (1975) and Rockport: The Making of a Tourist Treasure (1998), and to J.P. O’Neill’s The Great New England Sea Serpent (1999). The town of Rockport, Massachusetts remained dry until 2005.