Make It Stop

Jabez signed this 1724 war report to Gov. William Dummer with a confident hand and a bold stroke of his pen.

Crouch with me in the shoes of Jabez Fairbanks. It is 1676, and he is five years old. His father, his uncle, and his oldest brother lie outside in the snow, dead and broken, frozen in pools of their own blood, but he does not know that yet. Nor does he know why—why they hurried from their farm the night before, ran from their chores, ran from their beds, their hearth, ran from all he knew to the garrison house, where he squats now, jostled by frantic neighbors. What he knows is the choking cloud of gunsmoke, how his sister trembles as she holds him close, the ferocity in his mother’s eyes as she tears a strip of fabric from her apron and kneels beside a fallen, writhing man to bind his wound.

The noises will ring in his ears for years to come: the shrieks of the attackers, outside, joyful with rage; the cries of children, desperate with fear; the shouts of the men, thick with defiance, as they thrust their muskets through the loopholes in the thick wooden walls and take aim; the ragged thudding drumbeat of gunfire; the rattle of the shuttered windows and the barred door as they shudder from bullet strikes and tomahawk blows. He brings his hands to his ears and squeezes, but the awful, unrelenting sounds pass through his fingers just the same.

It’s wrong, all wrong.

“Make it stop!” the boy screams.

No one hears.

Now it is 1697, and Jabez is twenty-seven years old. War is again upon him, but it is harvest time, and the men must work the fields, leaving them isolated and vulnerable. He is checking an ear of corn—almost ready—when his horse beats the ground with a front hoof, shakes its mane, mutters. He follows its gaze to the woods, sees the attackers emerging from the trees. He mounts and rides for the garrison house, half a mile away, rides hard, knowing the gate to the stockade that surrounds it is open, knowing a child of his is sheltered inside. He gets there first, slams and secures the gate, rings the alarm bell. The attackers, running after him, scatter instead, turning their attention back to the farms and crops. Easier targets. He joins his neighbors in driving the attackers off and this time, the town is saved. But when the day is over, a second brother lies among the dead, as does a nephew, and his brother’s wife is among the captives.

Now it is 1704. Jabez is thirty-four. War is again upon him, this time the doing of distant kings and queens. But the enemies are close at hand and familiar. A group of several hundred French and Indian attackers descend on Lancaster and its six garrisons. Jabez joins in mounting a vigorous defense. But by the time reinforcements arrive from neighboring towns, four neighbors are dead and a number of structures burned, including Jabez's barn, with eight loads of good hay inside it. Alarms persist. The men stand watch a third of their time, ranging the woods, neglecting their crops. They risk hunger and impoverishment, but see no other choice. Danger hangs over the town for years. In 1708, three men are captured and taken to Canada, and two others killed. Jabez signs a petition describing his end of town as "the extreme front" and seeking relief from taxes.

Now it is 1724. Jabez is fifty-four years old, and, with war once again upon him, he is a lieutenant in the militia, charged by the governor with organizing a screen of scouting parties while keeping enough soldiers in what is now a cluster of frontier towns, including his own, to reassure their fearful residents. He hasn’t enough men to do both, and it weighs upon him. “I find it impossible to improve so small a number of men so as to answer the anxieties of the people here whose circumstances are so verry difficult & Distressing,” he writes the governor. But he follows orders, and leads dozens of scouting parties himself, one lasting weeks. They pause for nothing but foul weather and the Sabbath. “We scouted down the River to Gard the people,” he wrote of one day’s foray, “& (ranged) the woods in the most likeliest places to discover the enemy.” He and his men find nothing. But should it please God to smile on their efforts by revealing nearby warriors, he intends to strike the savages without mercy. If he comes across their elders, wives, and children hiding in their shelters, he intends to strike them down too.

It is 1755 and he is eighty-five years old. An old man now. He has seen ten children into this world. The youngest of his six sons, Thomas, has tears in his eyes as he kneels before him and delivers one last blow.

“My Samuel is dead,” says Thomas, a veteran of Indian warfare himself. “Killed in the Lake George campaign.”

The old man rocks, wordless, in his chair.

“He did his duty,” Thomas says, choking as he speaks the words. “You can be proud.”

The violence has spanned eight decades, touched four generations, and claimed seven members of Jabez's family: his father, his uncle, two brothers, a nephew, and now two grandsons.

He has endured. His descendants have multiplied. He is celebrated as a military hero.

He brings his hands to his ears and squeezes. Screams a silent scream.

“Make it stop,” he says.

"I don't know how," Thomas tells him.

~

Jabez Fairbanks lived through most of our family's century of violence, beginning in his childhood with a struggle for survival known as King Philip's War and ending after his death with the American Revolution. His name was taken from a passage in the Old Testament: “His mother had named him Jabez, saying: ‘I gave birth to him in pain.’” He knew pain in life too, as a victim of strife and suffering. But he was also a cause of strife and suffering, beginning with his very presence on land that had been home to the region's indigenous people—the Indians—for 13,000 years. People Jabez and his fellow colonists treated not as equals, but as lesser beings. As savages.

Jabez is part of our family. Fact is, he’s the reason we’re here.

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