Dreamwater

   

    In order to write Dreamwater, the sequel to When Two Women Die, I had to follow my character, Ned Low to some very dark places. On the surface, he is the powerful, evil character we love to hate. But, Ned is more than that.

    When Ned was kidnapped at the end of When Two Women Die, I knew in my heart what would happen to him. Upon researching the time period, my suspicions were confirmed. Because I thought the most obvious position he could hold was cabin boy, a lowly servant on the ship, the first thing I did was look up the definition of cabin boy. I found this sarcastic reference on urbandictionary.com: “Often buggered by the professional sailors onboard until they get shore leave.” Buggered is a slang term for sodomy, though both terms have been used to mean other forms of sexual contact, or even loose living in general. Further research reinforced what I thought would happen. But, the clincher came from the articles (ship’s rules) of pirate Captain Bartholomew Roberts, which stated “No boy or woman to be allowed amongst them.”

    From that rule alone I knew I was right. The fact that a rule needed to be made said very clearly that the situation was real. Ned would probably have been sexually abused. I felt, in Dreamwater, Lowther would have taken Ned for himself exclusively.

    17^th Century attitudes toward sex were very different than our modern ones. We think in terms of child abuse, and rightly so. As late as the 19^th Century, however, child prostitution was rampant. Decent people will always find adult sex with a child to be abhorrent. Nevertheless, for many children in the 17^th Century adult sex may have meant survival - a very sad kind of survival. Every day, Ned wants to “slit Lowther’s throat” but he needs him to survive.

    Pirates were savages. Not followers of rules, though historians will tell you, “Oh, yes! The ship’s articles were taken very seriously.” I think historians are referring to privateers, those civilized beings that bathed, dressed in silk and played violin. A privateer was a different animal. A privateer had a license signed and sealed by royalty to commit theft and bring the spoils back to his King or Queen. If a privateer killed while committing this royal theft, the law might look the other way.

    Pirates were criminals. They had no license to steal or kill. They may have had articles but, from my research, I doubt a real pirate followed stringent rules. Even now, shipboard rules are in place to keep order, as a ship cannot sail in chaos. However, pirates were wild. They were almost constantly drunk, and often fell overboard because of it and drowned. To illustrate the bedlam that was normal on a pirate ship: the articles of the real pirate Ned Low included rules about drunkenness during the taking of a vessel, as well as rules against shooting pistols below deck. Sex between men aboard ship, where quarters were cramped and privacy nil, seems to have been a matter of convenience and mutual consent; it happened regardless of rules. The rowdy celebratory sex that occurs after successfully taking a ship in Dreamwater was a well-chronicled part of pirate revelry. Pirates’ lives were based on risk and murder, thievery and instant gratuitous pleasures that were to be grasped quickly and savored lest the chance be wasted. Death was quite literally at their door.

    In my research, I also learned this harsh truth: pirates loved to torture. Pirates were vicious. They celebrated their victories by playing with their victims in ways that rivaled the Inquisition. Every form of torture I mention in Dreamwater was documented and performed at one time or another by actual pirates or slave traders. For instance, as an adult, the pirate Ned Low really cut off and roasted the lips of a captain whose ship he had taken, and forced the man to eat them. Slave traders could be just as brutal as pirates, using torture to control their captives.

    However, Ned Low is more than a villian. He has redeeming virtues: his strength, his vulnerability and his love for women.

    In Dreamwater, Ned is taken up by the whores of Isabella as a kind of toy or mascot. Ned is also in love with Molly Treadwell. Ned Low is more sociopath than charming rogue, but his appreciation for women and especially his affection for the good and beautiful Molly Treadwell redeem him. And, yes, a part of Ned’s attraction to Molly is his desire to have power over goodness. Perhaps to defile goodness, but after doing so, he is in love. Goodness wins.

    In history, the real pirate Ned Low was a romantic. In his youth, he had been something of a playful thief back in England. He tried to go straight in Boston, where he wed his true love, Eliza Marble. The real Ned Low did not become a pirate until his beloved wife died in her second childbirth. He had already lost a son. After some trouble during which Low killed a man, he turned to piracy. Low left his daughter behind, an action about which he expressed deep regret. Sometimes, when he was lucid and not drunk, he would “weep plentifully” for his lost child.[1] Because of his own romantic experience with love, Low always asked a man if he were married before pressing him; he would only press single men on to his ship. He was known to free female prisoners.

    Loving Molly might be Ned’s redeeming virtue and Molly may essentially be a good person, but her affection for the wicked Ned proves her youthful attraction to the forbidden: Molly is not completely innocent. Like a typical pre-teen, Molly is off dabbling in things she shouldn’t – magic and romance with a bad guy. I had no intention of joining Ned with Molly. She threw her scarlet ball of yarn according to the courtship game in When Two Women Die, but when Ned’s foot came down on it, and all the girls giggled, I realized Molly loved Ned. I had intended to marry her to another character. It was clearly an instance of characters taking off in their own direction away from the author’s intention. I felt something shift in Molly and I followed her lead. I always listen to my characters and consider where they want to go. I am in charge, but after all, they are the ones who love and fear and struggle.

    I want to talk about age. In Dreamwater, Ned and Molly are very young. Because of their youth, I wanted to stress in 1995 how advanced young people can be; that is why I made Pete and Sarah very smart at only ten, and why the ghost hunters are fifteen years old.

    In the 17^th Century, there was no age of consent, as we know it, because fathers gave their consent, not girls or boys. Children were betrothed or even married at age two or three, sometimes because one parent, or both, had died. Marriage was an economic necessity of life. A partnership of survival. A classic example of early marriage is in Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, when Juliet’s mother chides her for being unmarried and middle-aged at fourteen. Elizabeth Treadwell herself was married at fourteen. Molly Treadwell, at ten. Therefore, we do have a marriage consummation scene between eleven-year-old Ned, who has been tutored by the prostitutes of Isabella on Isla Hispaniola, and Molly, who is a ten-year-old virgin.

    Ned is also strikingly handsome. We seem to have a deep psychological need to be attracted to our villains. Some of our most popular villains are handsome. From Robert Lovelace and Alec D’urberville to Patrick Bateman and Tom Ripley, we love to hate an appealing villain. Ned is certainly good-looking. In When Two Women Die, when we first see him, I describe him thusly: “His sharp features cut a darkly handsome profile into the bright day.” Some have called Ned a hero, because of what he accomplishes in Dreamwater, but I think we have blurred the line between hero and villain. Sometimes, in our stories, our villains become our heroes.

    I want to take a minute to discuss the liberties I have taken with history. The real Ned Low, according to records, was born in London in 1690. I wanted Ned to be a character in When Two Women Die and I needed him to be at least nine years old in 1690, so I adjusted his birthplace and his age.

    There were other, more inconsequential, details I altered for my own use in When Two Women Die. I changed Edward Dimond’s house to be much simpler than historians believe because I disagree with them about the house. I think it was built much earlier than the 18^th Century, because Edward Dimond was in Marblehead before the 18^th Century. For the sake of drama and character, I wanted Ol’ Dimond to be a loner in a very small fisherman’s shack. I also made Elizabeth’s house more humble, with a ladder instead of a staircase in order to add tension and danger to events that happened on that fateful stormy night when she and the children hid from pirates in the upstairs bedroom. I changed Roger Williams’ name to “Codger Williams” for effect. By 1690 he was already dead when I needed him to ride down the road so that Rosie could throw raspberries at him. However, the real Roger Williams really did try to force the women of Salem to wear a veil over their faces and John Cotton really spoke against him. Just at a slightly earlier time. I wanted to show how attitudes were beginning subtly to shift in Salem toward the dangerous and frightening situation of the witch trials. In When Two Women Die, Rosie goes to see Ol’ Dimond to ask his psychic advice about her pregnancy. In Dreamwater, just two years later, she will be arrested for practicing witchcraft with the old seer.

    Dreamwater, like When Two Women Die, is full of magic and paranormal occurrences. Marblehead, with its simple historic homes, old winding streets and dramatic rocky shores, lends itself to mystery. Pirates are still sighted climbing over the rocks and the mysterious Englishwoman’s screams are still heard at midnight. I hid Rosie, Molly and the baby, Lena in the “Witch Cave” in Nahant, possibly a site of ancient worship, where an accused witch and her daughter actually did hide in 1692.[2] Magic and the paranormal (more normal than we realize) were ever-present in our ancestors’ lives and are still present in our own. We’d recognize these constant, daily phenomena if we only looked with open eyes and open minds.

    Of course, in Dreamwater, I have a whole set of other characters in 1995 who are also struggling to make their dreams come true: Peter Treadwell is trying to come to terms with his young wife’s sudden death, while his daughter sees and speaks to her mother’s ghost; his son Pete wants to study ghost hunting, but finds himself caught up in internet dangers; Jo Simmons just wants to enjoy her new business and her new husband, but she is being stalked; Cassandra is working very hard on understanding reality as well as she understands her psychic visions.

    We’ve learned a great deal about how to live since the 17^th Century, as you will see, when you read Dreamwater. Now we have someone to call when we are in trouble. But, we still struggle. 

    As ever, Marblehead emerges as an extraordinary place. A place of almost paranormal loveliness, a place of history, of magic, a place where people still strive, but a place where many, rich and poor, have divined how to live, how to find their dream and how to make it real.

---

[1] Edward E. Leslie, Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls, Houghton Mifflin, 1988, account of the captive, Philip Ashton of Marblehead, p. 95.

^[2] Robert Ellis Cahill, New England’s Ancient Mysteries, Old Salt Box, 1993, p. 32.

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about the legends of Marblehead, and Dreamwater, the sequel to When Two Women Die, about the terrifying journey of Ned Low in 1692 and the restless ghost of Beth Treadwell in 1995.

The Assassination of the Bees

she never thought much of bees

now she thinks of them as though thinking will save them

sweet, little peacekeepers,

fuzzy, whirry in love with nectar

sticky stockings soaked with ordered thoughts

from God’s jeweled and spiraled fractals whirr, whirr, whirr

innocence diligence innocence

taken given taken given

dripping goo

dear peacekeepers,

you may choose violence only once

he who chooses violence chooses death

sweet little peacekeepers

all who love peace are assassinated

blindly led to slaughter

along enemy spirals

enemy poisons drunken sweetly as peaches

whirr, whirr, whirr your way, eat our AIDS

eat the crashing cacophony of

every virus known to man

every fungus unknown to bees

stuffed into your tiny body’s blackened goo

hungry predators pass over your sick jelly in the empty hive

Paris Opera House, beekeeper

dear, fuzzy peacekeepers

sing, sing on the safe and singing roof of the Paris Opera House

where no pesticides can eat your wings or stop your beating heart

where they understand the music of growing things

on the roof of the California bank,

a million strong you storm the castle keep

keeping far from poisoning your hive

and calmly tell the tellers, “Here, we will die now.”

oh, rue the day the bankers came to America!

sweet, noble peacekeepers

what will become of us?

of the harmonic rapture of every flowering fruit and vegetable sweetly singing with God’s great goo

oh, twisted blossoms of innocence! innocence!

sending fake nectar into choking bees

strangling our dear humming peacekeepers on their rose-scented mission

their tiny veins collapsing without

without

without

enough to eat

oh, if banks could decipher fractals!

too busy with counting chaos

oh, enter fractals into the brains of banks

pour into the mold of their vaults your hot rivers of scarlet molten gold

let them explode with your fire

fire is coming!

a million Chinese men feathering pollen with infinite patience

into a million starving, open-mouthed pear blossoms

cannot stave off the fire that is coming

oh, but think – can she remember

and where will her memories fly after the flames?

remember roses, once heavy with scent?

peaches? did the fuzz get up the nose and need to be corrected?

oh, remember delectable plums whose bloody flesh 
tingled the ears?

Wondrous watermelons of the desert, she wants to wade barefoot

in their sweet, syrupy water

Cherries, wine sweet bunches!

she is drunk on grapes!

and, where will the kitchen be without onions and garlic?

 Vatican Gardens, Rome

This is the loss of Paradise – not Adam and Eve!

why keep peace when profit glistens?

why! she closes her eyes to keep from seeing –

the tipping of the merchant’s ring -

the assassination of the bees.

        

 Note: Word on the e-street is that Monsanto has been killing queen bees. Gives new meaning to the word "assassination."                                                                   

©Patricia Goodwin, 2009

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, the story of two women who died and became legends in an historic seacoast town. Watch for the sequel - coming soon!

The Invasion of The Body Snatchers

            I recently saw the 1978 version of the film, The Invasion of The Body Snatchers, starring Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams, in which earth is invaded by cute little pink flowers that change into pods that devour real people and their emotions and passions and all the good people stuff and leave empty shells of people walking around like zombies.

            So? What’s new? That’s the point. I Netflixed the movie because I liked the actors. Brooke Adams is a fave, though she doesn’t work enough for my taste. And, Donald Sutherland, well, ‘nuff said. They were both brilliant, as usual, but I didn’t expect to hear what I did. It was the character of Nancy Bellicec, played by Veronica Cartwright, actress of the eyes too big for her face, giving her the most expression-filled demeanor of all, found to be awesome for horror films by many directors since.

            Nancy had all the best lines. She was the one who told her husband, played by Jeff Goldblum, “Don’t touch that! It could be toxic!” To which her hippy husband replied, “It’s a pink flower, honey.” Nancy – the sweet masseuse who insisted her plants have feelings - exploded with one amazing line after another, to which I responded with a gaping mouth. After Nancy was done, I realized I was watching something a lot deeper than a movie about an alien invasion. Not that an alien invasion isn’t deep or scary enough. The original book, The Body Snatchers was written in 1956! I know the accepted idea is that the author, Jack Finney, was referring to the McCarthy trials. But, as I listened to Nancy, I couldn’t help thinking and feeling (since I’m not a pod, yet) –  A lot has happened since this was written and it’s still happening now!

Here’s what Nancy and Elizabeth, a health official (Brooke Adams), and Jack, Nancy’s husband (Jeff Goldblum) said:

Jack: This smells lovely.

Nancy:  I want you to listen to me.

Jack: I am listening to you, Nancy.

Elizabeth: That flower. Where did you get that?

Jack: In the vase with the others.

Nancy: Put it down, Jack.

Elizabeth: It's a pod with a flower on it. I could not find that flower in any book.

Nancy:  Jack, put it down.

Jack: It's a pink flower, honey.

Nancy: It could be toxic.

Elizabeth: I have seen these flowers all over. They grow like parasites on other plants. Where are they coming from?

Nancy:  Outer space.

Jack: They're not from outer space.

Nancy: Why not?

Jack: They're not. Why? What are you talking about? A space flower?

Nancy: Why not a space flower? Why do we always expect metal ships?

Jack: I've never expected metal ships.

Nancy: There must be other ways they get in our systems.

Elizabeth: Right. They could be getting into us through touch or fragrance.

Jack: We would never even notice it, not from the impurities we have. I mean, we eat junk and we breathe junk.

Elizabeth:  I don't know where they're coming from, but I feel as though I've been poisoned. We've gotta take those flowers in and have them analyzed. There's something here.

Nancy: They could get into us and screw up our genes like DNA, recombine us, change us.

 Jack: Oh, of course!

Nancy: This is the same way those rockets landed years ago, so those spacemen could mate with monkeys and create the human race. It's happening now!

            Let’s put the alien take-over thing aside. It’s a moot point.

WARNING LABEL: The sensitive ones should leave the room. Or, if you are the kind of person who says, “Who are you to tell me what I can or can’t put in my body?” then don’t read any further. Go to McDonalds or Taco Bell.

The Real Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been going on for about 70 years now, since the end of World War II, when two things took over – one, mass production of our food and two, mass transportation of our food. Our food used to be grown and prepared in small batches of whole, fresh ingredients. It was placed in cloth sacks or wooden crates. Liquids were in glass bottles, crocks, cans or kegs. Our food was still natural and close to homemade. Bread was brown. Cows were not given artificial hormones. However, when farms got larger and more specialized, our food needed to be transported longer distances. No longer could you make a product naturally. Mix together the ingredients and those ingredients usually separated or looked terrible in a jar. You couldn’t transport it like that anyway. You needed preservatives. You needed stabilizers like guar gum, which is not thickening enough on its own without adding borax occasionally, or stabilizers like dehydrogenated animal fat, which is akin to plastic and could be already lumped in different corners of your body. You would need artificial coloring.  Then, since you stripped the natural nutrients, perhaps to create the more attractive white bread, you would need to add artificial vitamins. You needed to add salt to keep food from spoiling. You needed to add sugar to make it taste better after you’d added salt. You needed flavor enhancers like monosodium glutamate in order to compete with companies using flavor enhancers in their products. You might have to heat the food to a carcinogenic-causing temperature. Packaging itself became artificial, a risky business that is just now becoming a suspected source of poisoning. Refrigeration became common. Food was transported from tropical areas to colder areas. People no longer ate seasonal food. They could get oranges in winter. Nice, right? Tropical fruit lowers the body temperature. Not as nice in the north as it is in the south. Tropical fruit, as a matter of fact, any locally grown food, has a purpose. Winter squashes, burdock, onions, all these grow naturally in colder climates and are good for circulation, i.e., keeping warm in winter.

Also, around the end of World War II came our love affair with science. We’re just now discovering that some of the wonders of science may be poisoning us – polyester (carpets, drapes, sofas, etc.), air-conditioning, plastic – toxins decomposing and entering our lungs - even as we sit in the evenings and watch our televisions - which poison our minds as well as our bodies. Microwaves were invented to rearrange the molecules of our food. Most of us, including this writer, sit at computer screens radiating God-knows what into our brains, all day long. We keep cell phones tucked in our pockets next to our gut or attached directly to our ears. We wash our hair with suspicious unctions, and blindly slather possible cancer-causing creams over ourselves to prevent possible cancer causing UV rays from reaching our skin. Scientists began creating GeneticallyModified Organisms by infiltrating plant DNA with pesticides and DNA from foreign plants and animals, such as bacteria into corn or soy. GMOs are now thought to cause ulcerations in the stomach and intestine. Bees are dying by the millions. Even our pets are getting sicker. Celiac disease, a troubling sensitivity to wheat, seemed to come out of nowhere and is increasing. Animals have been cloned and we are eating the meat of clones, deemed “safe” by our FDA. Milk is full of hormones and antibiotics. Also deemed to be safe.

Got milk? No need for an alien take-over. We are lining up.

We are now four generations of degeneration. The last generation grew up entirely on artificial foods. I call them “the Froot Loops (notice the word froot is not the word fruit) for breakfast, microwaved pizza for lunch, microwaved mac and cheese for dinner” generation. What happens to a generation that never ate any real food?

Here’s the bottom line:

Cancer was rare before World War II. You had to be seriously out of balance to get cancer. Now, everyone expects to get cancer or some other serious degenerative disease, like diabetes or heart disease. Heart disease is the number one cause of death in the U.S. Diabetes is increasing worldwide.

In the ‘50s, only the “bad” kid had ADD or ADHD. Allergies were rare. Autism, also rare. Asthma, rare. Now, asthma, allergies, autism, behavioral problems, all seem to be epidemic. In her book Louder Than Words, actress Jenny McCarthy tells how she relieved many of her son’s autism symptoms, including not speaking, by eliminating dairy and sugar from his diet. In the book Crime & Diet by Michio Kushi, you can read about the experiment at the Tidewater Virginia Detention Home for Boys, which under the direction of Frank Kern and Stephen J. Schoenthaler, in 1981, took sugar out of the diet of the boys in the home for three months. The boys, ages 12-18, were in detention for crimes including alcohol and narcotic violations, disorderly conduct, larceny and burglary. During the time sugar was not in their diets, the boys’ incidents of violence decreased by 45%.

Right now, drugs are being used to treat allergies, asthma, autism, ADD and ADHD and other physical and behavioral conditions. Plus, drugs for the side effects caused by those drugs - many of which are now being suspected of causing cancer.

You can try to get cancer rates from the American Cancer Society. But, you have to dig through individual types of cancer, regions, sex, etc. and a whole spectrum of specifics designed to discourage you. Here’s some plain talk from preventcancer.com:

What then is driving the modern cancer epidemic? Study after study points to the role of runaway industrial technologies, particularly those based on petrochemicals. The explosive growth of the petrochemical industry since the 1940s has far outpaced legislative and regulatory controls, producing a dizzying array of synthetic chemicals that have never been screened for human health effects: of the roughly 75,000 chemicals in use today, only some 3 percent have been tested for safety. For over fifty years, in other words, the American public has been unknowingly exposed to avoidable carcinogens from the moment of conception until death.

If you think you can handle the truth, I recommend liking Dr. Helen Caldicott on Facebook. Dr. Caldicott has been an anti-nuclear champion for decades. She’ll keep you informed of the daily radioactive seepage in the world - it’s not just from nuclear accidents any more.

One of the most compelling reasons I am writing this particular post is the recent death of one of my macrobiotic teachers from liver cancer. How does a macro create cancer? I have asked myself, over and over. The answer is simple. We are all susceptible. We are all vulnerable. I could be riddled with cancer even as I write. Usually, it’s your favorite binge food that gets you in the end. Yet, each day, as a macro, I observe changes in myself and when those changes are undesirable, I think, what have I done to cause this? And I change that. For instance, I have gotten rid of horns growing on my head and sometimes my arms, since my genetic code doesn’t know what to do with the information it’s receiving, i.e., I am not a baby goat, by giving up goat cheese. With goat cheese went a horrible, persistent pain in my right knee that was keeping me from walking without a limp. I still have an occasional twinge in that knee from arthritis I inherited from my beautiful Italian grandmother and mother, and I’m working on that too with exercise and other dietary adjustments, but the arthritis is nothing like the stabbing agony of the arterial blockage caused by excess dairy. I also got rid of a horrible, nagging ache in my neck that was causing me to lose sleep and wrap my neck with a scarf indoors– by stopping the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee I drank occasionally when I went out with a certain friend. I noticed the pain always came after drinking the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. Gone, and gone! Also, by stopping Maxwell House coffee at home, I got rid of intestinal bleeding. Gone. I wouldn’t be surprised if I had been ingesting something other than coffee with both those brands. (Note: Every one of us is different and different products may be affecting you in different ways. Be honest with yourself when self-reflecting.)

That’s what macrobiotics can do for you.

However, macrobiotics is no match for the invisible toxins we consume every day. If I had to say how my teacher got liver cancer, I would say from self-sacrificing overwork, eating too strictly and toxins.

Some of those toxins are in the food we sometimes eat, maybe out of convenience or downright desperation when we are outside the home, starving and have to eat something fast and get back to work. Other toxins are ingested from the cars that pass by, cigarette smoke, the strong perfume of the woman next to us on the train or when we sink down into the sofa at night exhausted, little spores drift up on the air and enter our nostrils.

The reason I said that alien invasion was moot is because we are the aliens and we are invading ourselves. Aliens have already been here and gone. That ship, if you will, has flown. If they want to return and take over, we will be powerless. However, we are not powerless against ourselves.

We can change. One of the things we learned when we began macrobiotics in the ‘70s was to get rid of all artificial products in our lives, for instance, to wear loose cotton clothing that breathed and kept human energy flow even and natural. It’s not always easy to do so, but the closer you can get to clean air, clean home, clean food, the better off you will be. You might have to put in the extra time and work of making your own lunch at home, making a pot of beans on the weekend - lentils or chick peas - great convenience foods that can be stored in the refrigerator – or a pot of brown rice to always have ready. You might have to avoid fast foods. Or, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.

The problem, as it was in the film The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is going to sleep. That’s when the pods started to take over our human bodies, our passions and our caring.

Don’t go to sleep. Stay vigilant. Keep watch over yourself and your loved ones. Take good care. Body Snatchers are everywhere.

©PatriciaGoodwin, 2013

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation. Her newest poetry books are Telling Time By Apples, And Other Poems About Life On The Remnants of Olde Humphrey Farme, illustrated by the author, and Java Love: Poems of a Coffeehouse.