Project Purple

29 - The Matron

The colony began its day very early.

Heidi Burrhen, the Matron, supervised the work-starting the cooking fires, carrying the water from the river, gathering what they could from their modest kitchen gardens, and getting meat from the smokehouse. Breakfast was usually a mush with milk from the goats, sweetened with molasses. The mid-day meal, dinner, was the heaviest, commonly a stew with maybe a pudding. Supper, the evening meal, was generally warmed up leftovers.

The men rarely left anything on their plates, so great their appetites were after the daily ten-hour work crews had chopped down logs, then split and shaped them into fence posts, or into spars and riggings for the hypothetical English ships.

But the women were no different; in fact, it seemed to Heidi that the women were eating more than the men; that they were, simply, ravenous for anything she cooked, devouring their portions with unfettered gluttony; it was more animal-like than feminine-that was a fact.

Heidi was worried: They were roaring through the food at an alarming rate.

Wallace, the Governor, a liberal pacifist by nature, didn't share her concerns.

"What about education?' he asked, "It's time to teach them."

The Governor was obdurate about this: "Harvard College was established in 1636, just sixteen years after the arrival of the American forefathers."

"You can't eat Harvard," they objected.

The Governor sloughed off their complaints. "During its early years, the college offered classic academic courses based on the English university model-but following the prevailing Puritan philosophy of the first colonists."

"Wallace, we have to start hunting."

"Harvard, however, was never formally affiliated with a specific religious denomination."

The Governor, having located his pipe, lit up again, the familiar plume splitting at his nose as it rose once more. And he waited for the others to absorb his lightening bolt declaration.

But the only person to show any interest in the plan was the Preacher, who nodded along as the Governor bubbled on:'"To advance Learning and Perpetuate it to Posterity'- We will instill learning into our very own colonial students."

Heidi and the others were unmoved, and so Wallace contrived a different angle: Founding an academic institution would earn high marks from their assessors, who were coming-when? At the end of the month?

Heidi, like the others, would believe that when she saw it. Was anyone really coming? Or had they been abandoned out here in God-knows-where, only to fend for themselves, until none of them were standing?

She eyed Wallace with some sympathy. Governing was hard, Heidi knew that, but Wallace had set too much store in his dogmas, and not enough in the give-and-take between ideas and experiences. Academics just had to wait; they had to become proficient hunters, or trappers, in a very short time, or they would all suffer the lingering ruination of just wasting away.

The next morning, the Governor approached the two servants about the idea of studying the origins of rhetoric. And every morning he taught the Goatwench and the Badger about such things as Encomiums to Helen of Troy, and about Plato and Aristotle.

"Henri's perking up,' he claimed, "the learning is just what she needs to activate her mind."

Heidi didn't agree. The servants were needed elsewhere; the chores never abated; there was so much work to be done.