Cape Cod

by William Martin

  “Yet we did never regain our post at Penobscot,” said Standish.

  “Good gentlemen!” John Winslow jumped up once more. “Father Druillettes is interested in the Christ we worship, not the commerce we pursue.”

  “He is a papist.” Bigelow waved his bony hand, as if that was enough explanation.

  “We have not come together to argue theology,” snapped Bradford. “We have grievance ’gainst the French over the Penobscot, but if French priests would teach the Word to the Abenakis, and we have not the ministers to Protestantize them, it is meet for us to give our assent.”

  “Merci, M’sieur le Gouverneur.” The priest bowed. “We interest also in une entente… an alliance. We bring, as you say, the Word to the Abenakis, but west of them are the Iroquois, who ’ave the devil for a god.”

  To Father Daladier, these words were like the ringing of the bells in the papist mass. He raised his hands, spread the six fingers and four stumps, and showed them around as though showing the holy host. Then he placed his hands on the table and folded what fingers were left.

  “The Iroquois pull out all his nail, then cut off the finger which are consecrated to ’old the sacred bread.”

  “Blasphemy,” whispered William Bradford.

  “Amen.” Jack Hilyard finished his brandy with a slurp, but the governor did not refill his glass.

  “Others the Iroquois crucify. They make fire ’round the cross, and as the priest watch the flames burn them, the savage cut off their cooked flesh and eat of it. This they call Iroquois communion.”

  “God have mercy,” whispered Bradford.

  “Bloody heathens,” said Standish.

  Father Druillettes let the story hang a moment in the air. “In Baston, and now ’ere in Pleymout, I ask for ’elp of good Christians to put down these ’eathens.”

  “Mon-seur Droo-lay,” said Bigelow. “Our colony is not threatened by the Iroquois. Neither is the only trading post we have left in Maine. What vantage is there to help the French in anything?”

  “Much good will come, m’sieur.” Druillettes waved a hand at Father Daladier, who stood and went toward the sideboard.

  Jack Hilyard took the brandy bottle and poured himself more in spite of Bradford’s scowl. He drank it down quickly and waited for the revelation. But it did not come.

  Instead, Ezra Bigelow stood and smacked his hands on the table. “I see no good from an alliance with the French. War is usually more imminent with them than with anyone else. Better to make our alliance with the Iroquois against the French papists.”

  Father Druillettes’ face flushed as red as Bradford’s waistcoat. He raised his hand, and Father Daladier stopped in his tracks. “M’sieur le Gouverneur, is this your belief?”

  “You must forgive Master Bigelow. He speaks harshly.”

  “Et l’entente?”

  “What did Boston say?” demanded Bigelow.

  “That the Kennebec is yours, so the decision is yours.”

  “Let us think upon it,” said Bradford.

  “Très bien,” said the priest. “Et merci. Maintenant, excusez-nous.” He folded his hands before him and left with Father Daladier and the box close behind.

  Jack grinned at Ezra. “Still makin’ friends wherever you goes.”

  iii.

  Father Jacques Daladier had withstood Iroquois torture, but he could not withstand Jack Hilyard’s curiosity.

  Jack and the priest spent the night on cornhusk mattresses in the great room of William Paddy’s home. Father Druillettes retired to a feather bed on the second floor, while Jack’s crew slept in the barn, well cheered by the beer he had brought them. It was a crime to give beer to Indians, but a small offense, thought Jack, when one of the Indians was a woman who slept at the side of a white man. Jack also brought a bucket of beer into the house. He mixed it with whaling stories and a bit of sympathy for a lonely Jesuit’s fingers, and led the talk toward the metal box.

  Father Daladier had to grip the mug between his palms because he had no thumbs. “The beer, it is good. Most time I drink water.”

  “Terrible stuff.” Jack spoke in a low voice, so as not to awaken anyone else. “We run low on beer and had to drink water the first winter. When it come spring, half of us was dead, me dear first wife amongst ’em. There’s plenty that think ’twas the water what done it.”

  The priest licked the foam from his mustache. “The water, it is not good for any man.”

  Jack stared into the fire. “Them was hard days.”

  “That is what the Capuchins tell us.”

  “The who?”

  “The missionaries of Port Royal en Acadie. Quand ils… Excusez-moi, mais mon anglais, n’est pas bien, et…”

  Jack couldn’t speak French, but he sensed that the priest was starting to feel the beer. He poured a little more. “These Ca-poo-chins, how’d they know ’bout us?”

  “Ils l’ont lu… er, they read in a book.”

  Somewhere in the house, someone was snoring. Jack could feel the vibration in his chair. He took a deep breath and said softly, “What book?”

  “The book we bring in the iron box. Les capucins, when they ’ear that the Patriarch comes to Pleymout, they say, give this book if it will make une entente.”

  Jack Hilyard studied the firelight in the priest’s glassy eyes. “What is this book?”

  “The journal by the master of the ship that brought them.”

  “Christopher Jones?”

  “Je ne sais pas. I do not seen the book. I know only that it tell the story of great dying and great faith. We think to give it to the men of Pleymout this night, but M’sieur Bigelow—” Daladier shrugged and slid his mug across the table for more beer.

  Jack gave up the last of his own. “Bigelow spoilt the gift-givin’?”

  “We are friends with Winslow, but this Bigelow is no friend with us. Père Druillettes say ’e wait for une entente, armed men in the field ’gainst the Iroquois, before ’e give the gift. Until then, pas de mot.” He pressed his fingers to his lips, in the universal gesture for silence, and seemed startled that the index fingers were not there.

  “The book goes back to Port Royal, then?”

  The priest nodded.

  “Would the Patriarch let a ignorant whaler read it?”

  “No. It is a secret.”

  “Well, how’d the Ca-poo-chins get it, then?”

  “I tell too much already, but that is the part plus intéressant.”

  That night, Jack Hilyard slept by the fire, and as he drifted to sleep, the story of the book’s journey entered his dreams. The orange glow of the fire still danced before his eyes. Out of it came five Indians. They called him Weston Bloody Christian and ordered him to give over the box. He tried to protect it, but they tore it from him and pulled it open, and out dropped the book.

  The fire burned brighter and he felt greater heat. In his sleep, he kicked off his blanket. The Indians were holding him over the flames with the book in his arms. One of the Indians was speaking in his own tongue, but Jack understood.

  “Do not burn the book. The black robes say that God is in books. They read from books, then kiss them and hold them up to the sky. When they make their God from bread, they see how to do it from the book. We will give this to the black-robe priests to please them.”

  The Indians took the book from Jack’s arms, then threw him into the fire. He awoke with a shout, covered in sweat. The fire was burning down, the flames glimmering weakly on the great room walls. He reached for Elizabeth… or Kate, as he did each night, but a priest with mangled hands was snoring beside him, so he pulled up his blanket and slipped back to his dream.

  A candle glimmered on the chapel walls. With a hand pierced by nail holes, a priest turned the pages of the master’s journal. “The Indians bring it to one of our outposts to gain favor. The missionaries send it here to Port Royal. But it is useless.” He slid the book across a table, and Jack picked it up.

  “Useless to the French,” whispered
Kate, and her face became that of Elizabeth, “useless to the French, but for us, it do buy Nauseiput.”

  iv.

  Four years later, Port Royal lay quiet in the cool August sun. Cattle grazed in the fields. Smoke from cookfires curled into the sky. And the river ran like a ribbon of blue down from the green hills.

  “Somewhere in that town,” whispered Jack, “be the metal box that hold the key to our future.”

  “I came for no metal box,” said Jonathan. “What we do we do for the colony. ’Twill never be forgot.”

  “What we do we do for ourselves,” grumbled Christopher.

  “Find the Capuchins and there be the box,” whispered Jack to Christopher.

  “All you Massachusetts men,” cried the English sergeant, “into the boats!”

  “Forget not the Plymouth men!” added Robinson Bigelow, eldest son of Ezra.

  “Right well call yourselves king’s men. Into the boat!”

  On the poop deck of the Augustine, the drumbeat began. A moment later, it was taken up on the Hope and the Church. On the distant hills, the cattle began to run. On the fortress walls, men began to scurry. And down the valley rang the frightened sound of church bells on a Wednesday morning.

  Christopher Hilyard felt in his own gut the pounding terror that the drums were meant to drive into the people of Port Royal. He had no fear of whales, angry elders, or Cape Cod Indians, but he had not been made for war.

  Three sudden clouds of smoke shot up and out from the fortress walls. The thundering crump of three cannon pounded against the drumbeat in Christopher’s belly. Three columns of water rose around the Hope.

  “Pay no mind,” called Major General Sedgwick from the poop deck. “God will let no cannonball strike us.”

  “Lest we be fool enough to get in range,” whispered Jack.

  “Sedgwick speaks true,” chided Jonathan. “God protects the righteous.”

  “Then for certain he’ll show us no quarter,” said Christopher.

  Ezra Bigelow had been a prophet, after all. Whenever the struggle for faith and empire flared in the New World, England and France were no allies. The men of Plymouth had supported Father Druillettes, had even convened the United Colonies in New Haven to hear him present his case. But no English army had taken the field against the Iroquois. And now an English army was moving against the French.

  It had begun in disagreement between England and the Protestants of Holland. They had gone to war over trade, which, as Thomas Weston once said, mattered more to nations than faith. Lord Protector Cromwell, seeking to carry the conflict to the New World, had commissioned Boston Puritan Robert Sedgwick to raise an expedition against the Dutch at New Amsterdam and had sent seventy Roundhead troops, veterans of Naseby and the Irish Wars, to stand with the Colonial volunteers.

  Robinson Bigelow, a student at Harvard College, brought the call to Plymouth. Like his father, he believed that the future of Plymouth rested in the hands of the more powerful Massachusetts Bay Colony, and thus was it in Plymouth’s interest to join the expedition. But the men of the Plymouth Colony had known only good dealings with the Dutch, and only a few volunteered, among them Cape Cod militia captain Jonathan Hilyard.

  Then, just before the English flotilla left Boston, word arrived that the Dutch had sued for peace. And there sat Sedgwick, with three ships and a hundred and thirty men, yearning to fight for lord protector and country. In such circumstances, what would any good Englishman do but turn on the French?

  To entice more Plymouth men, young Bigelow sent word that they were now attacking Saint John, Port Royal, and the Penobscot trading post that the French had stolen from Plymouth twenty years before. When the name of Port Royal was heard at Billingsgate, the Hilyards became Cromwellians and Jack the oldest volunteer in the army.

  Now Christopher feared that he might vomit. With each thundering shot from the fortress walls, the knot in his throat nearly unraveled onto the men clambering ahead of him into the longboat. But he held on. Foul the helmet of one of Cromwell’s Roundheads and find yourself on the end of his pike.

  They landed beyond range of the guns and fanned out on the coastal plain below the fortress. By noon, the siege was neatly laid. And for the rest of the day, people from the village and the surrounding countryside streamed toward the gates, their children and livestock in tow. And for the rest of the day, the Hilyards studied the spired building that rose to the right of the fort.

  The Capuchins had erected a church and seminary at Port Royal, and it would seem that they were not about to leave it to the English.

  “They think God’ll pertect ’em,” Jack said to Christopher as they ate an afternoon meal of salt meat, hardtack, and beer, “so they’re staying close to their house.”

  “ ’Tis them bloody guns’ll do the pertectin’.”

  All day, the French had kept up the artillery fire, as much to show the abundance of their munition as their displeasure.

  “We needs to get into that church, fortress be damned.”

  “It be scarifyin’ work, Pa.”

  “Don’t be losin’ thy spine after all these years. Nauseiput be our island. Ourn from the time of the First Comin’. And this be the way to get it.”

  “It do us no good if we be dead.”

  “Before I die, I’ll bring me sons to Nauseiput. ’Tis me dream. I be old, but thou and Jon—”

  “I be forty-six.”

  “Younger ’n me, and in need of that master’s journal.”

  “I never needed it yet.” Christopher tore a piece of salt meat with his teeth and tried to swallow it.

  “Had I that log twenty-odd years ago, no Bigelow would’ve broke up our family and set us to wanderin’. Wif your taste for Injun women, you need a weapon ’gainst that man. So screw up the courage in that big gut of yours and think on the future.”

  “The future.” Christopher managed to swallow the meat. “Aye.”

  They told Jonathan nothing of the plan they made, for he would not have understood. He had no love of Nauseiput, nor any hatred of Ezra Bigelow. He was merely a brave Protestant answering the call of Cromwell, bravest Protestant of them all.

  Around four hours after noon the doors of the fortress swung open and out marched a hundred and twenty men. Though the French had supplies to last five months, they did not choose besiegement. Better to end the engagement quickly than suffer Englishmen or hunger for too long.

  In the camp, the drums began to beat and the men formed their ranks.

  Christopher Hilyard moved into position behind his father. He was no child to be taken by dreams of battlefield glory, no veteran of the Civil War carrying the banner of Protestantism. His goal was simpler. From the day that he first saw the Scusset Indians riding their canoe toward dusk, he had dreamed only of being like them. From the day that he saw Witawawmut’s head, he had dreamed only of peace.

  To gain the island where he had known his happiest moments, he had joined this little war. He longed, as much as his father, to live on Nauseiput. And for Nauseiput he would conquer his fear. He swallowed the knot in his throat and shambled off, eyes fixed on his father’s skinny back, hand around the stock of his gun.

  A mixed company of Massachusetts and Plymouth men had been given the right flank. Massachusetts men held the left. And in the van, separated from the flanking Colonials by twenty yards, were the red and blue tunics, the fierce helmets, and the pikes of Cromwell’s soldiers.

  To a European general on a hilltop, this engagement might have seemed like poor men’s war indeed. A few pennants fluttered in the sun. A handful of English advanced toward a line of fewer French. A tiny fortress, surrounded by rude dwellings, sputtering smoke and shot like an angry old man, stood the prize. And the vast Acadian wilderness paid no mind to any of it.

  But for the men in the lines, who heard the thundering cannon, felt the ground shake with each shot, saw the enemy through a curtain of dirt and smoke, a few minutes of bravery and chance would determine their fates.

&
nbsp; As he advanced across the grass, Christopher felt his wampum necklace tighten around his throat. He watched the sack at his father’s belt swing in rhythm with his gait. He listened to his holy brother Jonathan sing the Twenty-third Psalm like a song, while Robinson Bigelow kept up a brave line of talk for them all. And none of it made him feel any the braver.

  Then the French stopped. They dug their rests into the ground and mounted their muskets, which caused some of the green Colonials to hesitate, a few to fall back. But the Roundheads kept up their thudding step, and the sergeant who commanded them shouted to the flanks, “Run now and let their cannon shred you. Close with ’em and watch ’em fly.”

  “Aye!” cried Robinson Bigelow. “Show your courage or leave the field to men!”

  “Give ’em good Protestant fire,” added Jonathan Hilyard. “And remember what these bloody French say. The English may best the Dutch at sea, but one Frenchman’s match for ten English on land.”

  “We’ll not brook that!” shouted Jack Hilyard from the column, as though he truly believed it.

  “Run that lie down their gullets!” cried Jonathan.

  Jack dropped back and whispered to Christopher. “I sometimes marvel that he be me son.”

  “Or my brother.”

  “Remember, no matter what be said, when the volleyin’ start, we see fire comin’ down from that church.”

  “Aye,” grunted Christopher.

  “Halt!” The sergeant had not taken off his helmet all day, and in the heat, his face looked to have been cooked to the metal like beef to a grate.

  His disciplined Roundheads ceased their advance, and the Colonials did likewise.

  Now the artillery quit. A gentle wind drifted across the plain and blew the smoke off toward the ships. The field grew quiet. The soldiers had drawn close enough to settle the issue themselves. Though their muskets were not accurate weapons, when many were fired at once, a great gust of lead was blown toward the enemy. Thus were men grouped tightly to kill and be killed.

  The English sergeant ordered the flanks to fix rests.