Cape Cod

by William Martin

  Respect did not ease her father’s mortification, however. To let his daughter’s bastard be born beneath his roof was almost too much to bear. Yet how much worse would it be to put her out? asked his wife, Arbella. What kind of parents would they be then? What kind of Christians?

  Serenity felt the first pains on a raw morning in February 1717. The wind had swung ’round to the northeast, and snow clouds were blowing in. Arbella wrung her hands, then sent her husband to fetch the midwife, Goody Doane. But Goody Doane was off to tend another young woman, and this one had a husband.

  Jeremiah had learned to brook those insults he could not rebut, and with the first flakes fluttering down, he pulled his cloak around his neck and headed down the King’s Road to Goody Snow’s. There the news was the same, though more gently offered. Goody Snow had gone to the aid of Mrs. Bangs, near Sunken Meadow Pond, and could offer no help until Mrs. Bangs had been delivered.

  So Jeremiah took to the road once more. He was forty-nine, as strong and stubborn as the pin oak that rooted in the sand and dared the wind to blow it down, with a face that might have been cut from the hard oak wood itself. What he had survived in youth had prepared him for God’s arbitrary ways, and neither birth nor death disconcerted him. But the sight of Sarah Daggett coming through the snow nearly caused him to cry out in shock.

  “I guess thou be needin’ a midwife.” She was stooped and wrinkled and had only three teeth, and it was said that she always wore her bonnet because she had more hair on her chin than on her head. It was also whispered about that she was a witch.

  “How could you know our need?”

  She touched a finger aside of her nose. “I smelled it.”

  Yes, he thought, a witch. Why else would she have left her distant sandspit and traveled by shallop and on foot to meet him here on the road? But what would be more fitting than a witch to birth a bastard?

  ii.

  Serenity was eighteen, with wild black hair and eyes that could change from green to blue as quickly as the sea on a bright windy day.

  She had resolved that she would present Sam Bellamy with a healthy child, no matter that the midwives of Eastham might shun her, no matter the truth of the tales now reaching Cape Cod, tales of plunder and murder and great flaming hulks left for dead upon the sea. Her Sam, they said, had become a pirate. She would not believe it until he told her himself.

  When her labor began, she slid a box from under her bed and put it beside her. In it she had packed an hourglass to time the pains, clean swaddling, a sharp knife to cut the cord, thread to tie it, and a leather strap to bite on, so that her parents would not hear her scream. After all, her mother was no match for anyone’s pain, and she would give her father no satisfaction for the suffering brought on by her fornication.

  She was biting hard on the strap when Goody Daggett shook the snow from her shawl.

  “Another biter, eh?”

  The pain was rising to its peak. Serenity drove her teeth into the leather.

  “Bite down, darlin’, bite down.” The old woman winked at Arbella, who stood on the other side of the bed, her arms folded tight across her deflated breasts. “Just like all the rest, bitin’ and fightin’.”

  “I bit the strap through six births,” said Arbella. “What other way is there?”

  Serenity felt the pain receding now. Her body relaxed and settled back onto the bed. She closed her eyes and tried not to think. Then she felt the strap slipped from between her lips. A warm wet cloth was passed over her forehead. Outside, the wind whipped the snow against the house, but Serenity was aware only of the old woman’s touch.

  “You came far,” said Serenity.

  “I smelled the air this mornin’ and said there’d be babies by nightfall.”

  “Just by smellin’?” Arbella unconsciously took a step back from the bed.

  “Smelled a storm, I did. Nobody sees it, but babies is always born when there’s storms. And I knew there’d be one lass who might go beggin’ for a midwife.”

  “But all the way from Billingsgate Island?”

  The old woman smiled, as if to say that the journey was not so bad if you had a broomstick to ride on. “Serenity’s as good a girl as any, I’d say.”

  “She’d be better if she had a father for that child,” said Jeremiah from the doorway.

  “The child’s got a father,” snapped the old woman. “How in holy heaven does thou think it got in there? Just be thankful it’s got a strong mother.”

  “The father will come,” Serenity said softly.

  Jeremiah looked out at the snow. “Not this night.”

  Goody Daggett ordered him out, then took the girl’s hand. “Now let me show thee why they sometimes calls me a witch.”

  Serenity fixed her eyes on the old woman’s face. Arbella’s lips moved in a psalm; then she leaned close to hear the witchcraft.

  “To ease your pain, we’re going to use… the air.”

  “Spirits?” said Serenity.

  Arbella looked around the narrow birthing room.

  “Just the air.”

  “The air? What foolishness is this?” demanded Arbella, perhaps disappointed at such simplicity when she expected spells and newt’s-tongue stew.

  “God put air on this earth so’s birthin’ women could ease their pain.” And she told Serenity simply to breathe when she felt her womb tightening. Breathe fast and shallow, she said, in-out-in-out-in-out, and faster as the pain reached its peak.

  “What about the strap?”

  “The strap means thou’s fightin’, and there’s nothin’ finer than a woman with some fight in her.” Goody Daggett rubbed her smooth old palm over Serenity’s belly. “But that little beauty in there don’t want thee fightin’. He wants thee acceptin’, givin’ thanks. So do the most natural thing there is. Breathe. God’ll take care of the rest.”

  And he did. Blizzard and birth pains kept up the night through, but Serenity breathed hard and harder, and only at the end, when it came time to push, did she cry out. And the name she cried was Sam, again and again. Sam. I’ll birth you a son, and we’ll all three live happy. Sam. Come home. Black Sam. Black Sam Bellamy.

  And whatever warmth her father had felt for her went cold. Until that moment Jeremiah had prayed that it might have been a Cape Cod lad who had done his daughter, someone dishonorable and cowardly, for certain, but not the one they said was a pirate. When the baby’s cry rose above the wind, Jeremiah did not run into the room, as he had done at the births of his own children. Instead he pulled down the Bible and sought out the psalms.

  It was left for Serenity to summon him, and however reluctantly, he went. She looked radiant, joyous, and, for one of the few times in her life, serene. “His name will be Jeremiah Edward, Father.”

  Goody Daggett had said there was no better way to soften a man than to give his name to a child.

  “Jeremiah Edward what?” he asked coldly.

  Serenity’s smile faded. “He shall bear the last name that I bear… whatever it might be.”

  “That name’ll be Hilyard, for no decent man’ll have you now.”

  “Jeremiah Edward Hilyard, then.” She looked down at the black hair nestled against her breast. “But we’ll call him Ned.”

  The snow fell for two days more. When the sun appeared at last, three and a half feet covered the open fields, six-foot drifts rose against houses and hillsides, and Jeremiah was like to go mad with the chattering of the women and the squalling of the babe who now bore his name. So he put on snowshoes and went among his cattle. All but one had survived. He butchered that one and put out marsh hay for the rest, then began the seven-mile walk to his property in the north parish of Harwich.

  At Christopher’s death, Jeremiah had inherited Jack’s Island. He preferred Eastham, but he could never sell such a fine piece of salt marsh and upland. So he let a group of Praying Indians live there in exchange for half the money earned from cattle, hay, corn, and drift whales. This he set aside for the education of his so
n, Solemnity.

  And Solemnity was much on his mind as he came upon a funeral procession digging through the snow. A thousand Praying Indians bore to his rest the body of Samuel Treat, Eastham’s minister and righteous voice for the Indians of Cape Cod. Jeremiah had prayed that one day his son would replace Treat on the Eastham pulpit, when he had done with Harvard and prepared himself for the call. But Treat had died too soon. Now Solemnity would have to wait.

  Because of Serenity’s sin, he might have to wait forever.

  iii.

  Springtime came slowly to Cape Cod. On even the clearest day, a cold east wind kicked up after noon and kept coming until dark. With clouds to feed it, the wind turned wet as well, bringing fog and mist and rainy gloom that sat for days, as heavy upon the soul as upon the sand itself. And in the spring of 1717, not even the smile of an eight-week infant could brighten the gloom at Jeremiah Hilyard’s cottage.

  Serenity said she would leave when summer came. If Sam Bellamy returned, she would go with him, because pirate or no, it would mean that he loved her. Otherwise, she would simply leave and never think on him again. She did not know where she would go, but she could not sit by the fire and nurse her child for many nights more, while her mother clicked knitting needles and told her how well she took to motherhood—for a husbandless woman—and her father read aloud from the Bible, as if to drive her sin from his house.

  She felt the sucking at her breast grow gentler. She knew the babe was close to sleep. She had come to know, from merely his touch, what he wanted and what he liked. When Sam Bellamy’s beard first scratched her breast, she had cried out in shock and pleasure at the intimacy. But here was an intimacy that no lover could equal. Here she gave life to life. As she gently removed his mouth from her breast, she thanked God for the child, however he had come.

  “This is the night.” Jeremiah looked up from the Bible.

  “What?” Arbella sat in a Bradford chair beside the fireplace, her hands working steadily at her knitting.

  “This is the night that the Lord will send Black Bellamy to Cape Cod.”

  “ ’Tis foul weather for sailin’,” said Arbella.

  The wind had backed out of the northeast earlier in the day, and the rain had begun just after nightfall. The second great storm of Anno Domini 1717 had begun. Now the little house on the Nauset Plain shivered in the gale.

  “Does this prophecy appear in your Bible?” asked Serenity.

  “A just God sent a great blizzard to take a great man like Reverend Sam Treat. He sends a foul no’theaster to drown a foul fornicatin’ pirate like Sam Bellamy.”

  She looked at her baby. “The God who makes this child fatherless is not just.”

  “The father made him fatherless. And considerin’ the father, the child’s the better for it.”

  Serenity stalked up the stairs and put the baby into his cradle. When she came back to the great room, she was wearing her cape.

  “Where are you goin’?” demanded her father.

  “To show a just God my face. Let him see that some don’t cower.”

  “You defy God?”

  She took a lantern from the shelf and filled it with whale oil. “I defy the darkness.”

  But it was more than mere darkness. It was a wild, howling blackness of a storm that shook the trees and drove the rain like shot against her face, that sent the clouds scudding across the sky and produced, beneath the wail of the wind, a deep and steady roar that seemed the sound of creation itself.

  She followed the sound, and it led her to the edge of the earth. Even through the blackness, she could see the boiling surge a hundred feet below, hear the awesome thunder of it, and feel the ground quiver each time it tore into the bluff.

  But Serenity was not awed. She had come to shout defiance, to show God the face of one who would not fear him, of one who would never cease to ask him why, and who would start by asking why she had been born in this miserable corner of the earth, to a psalm-singing father, a devoutly superstitious mother, and a brother upon whom all the love and hope of the family rained down.

  What wonder that she was nothing like her name? These simple Protestants called their children after things they admired, Faith, Hope, Solemnity, even Wrestling and Increase, for the sons they hoped would wrestle the devil and increase the faith. But never would they name one Defiance.

  It was defiance had driven her into the arms of Sam Bellamy. Her father had told her to resist him. But how could she resist Sam Bellamy? Cape Cod farm boys talked about the number of herring they needed to manure a good cornfield, Cape Cod fishermen about the number of cornfields a good herring catch could manure. Sam Bellamy spoke of London and the Caribbean and the riches he would seek among the sunken treasure ships of the Spanish Main. He said no woman of his would hoe corn rows or make sewing needles from fish bones.

  She would never forget the sense of danger she had felt when he first slipped his arms around her and told her he loved her. She knew he was no more than a wastrel looking for a warm quim. But she stepped back and raised her skirts, and when he entered her, she felt that she had defied the world.

  As she drew breath to shout her defiance this night, she saw something that caused her to call God’s name instead. Two lights were glimmering through the black rain—the stern lights of a ship, a mile north and not more than a mile offshore. The lights were moving, which meant the vessel was still making headway, but she had entered the graveyard of ships.

  That was what they called the back shore from Chatham to the Provincelands, where great underwater waves of sand shifted with the current and rose from the sea as the tide ran out, protection for the bluffs against the full force of the Atlantic but treachery itself for the mariner lost in a gale.

  Serenity raised her lantern and began to run. She knew that by dawn, there would be dead men on the beach. She prayed that Sam Bellamy would not be among them.

  She had not gone far when the stern lights stopped and began to swing toward shore, as if the captain were turning toward her lantern. In panic she doused the flame. She had heard of mooncussers, plundering scoundrels who waved lanterns to lure lost ships onto the shoals.

  The lights stopped. Their motion had no bearing on her lantern. The captain had seen that wind and sea were taking the ship, and he had thrown out the anchors to hold her off the outer bar. The giant flukes had dug into the sand and the cables had snapped taut, turning the bow straight into the northeast wind. It was a last desperate maneuver, for a ship on the run could ride the waves, but a ship rooted to an anchor was no more bending than a fence post.

  Serenity was close enough to see in the blackness the black shadow of the ship and the waves exploding skyward as they struck. Then the stern lights began to slide. The anchors could not hold against the force of wind and sea, and the flukes became like great plows, cutting furrows across the sandy bottom.

  And Serenity ran, driven by the fear that her father’s prophecy had come true. She imagined Sam, screaming orders at terrified seamen, flogging them into the rigging to save what was left of the blown-out sails, driving them forward to cut the cables for a final seaward run, firing his pistol to keep them from the liquor store, where some would seek strength or oblivion, and clinging to the helm that might already have shattered the mate’s arms in a mad come-about spin. Her Sam, facing death because he had come back for her after all.

  Then the lights stopped moving. The ship had struck. A wave swept over the great shadow and the lights were gone.

  iv.

  The crying of the gulls woke Serenity, the crying and the strange quiet. The roar had receded, had all but ceased. There was sand in her mouth. Her cloak was soaked through. And her breasts ached with the fullness of her milk. She crawled out from under the holly bush where she had collapsed and looked over the edge of the bluff.

  The clouds were lifting off the horizon, like a ragged curtain, revealing a lurid band of red sky and a sea the color of slate. That sea now rolled over a shattered shoal of woo
d a thousand feet offshore, and with each crump of the surf, it carried more debris to the beach, so that the sand was strewn, for a mile in either direction, with spars and line, casks and crates, bolts of cloth and bottles… and bodies.

  Serenity pulled herself to her feet, and the bluff collapsed beneath her. Her stomach dropped; then her head seemed to follow it. She fell a hundred feet in an instant, tumbling and spinning down the steep embankment like a little girl in a giddy, dangerous game.

  She had forgotten that storms could tear great chunks of sand from the bottom of the bank, leaving the bluff loosened and unsafe. But there was no gentler fall, and no faster way to reach the beach. She landed, sitting upright, a few feet from the body of a man in a fine greatcoat. He lay on his stomach, his head twisted at a strange angle.

  “Sir?” she said. “Sir?”

  The man did not answer.

  She crawled over to him and nudged his shoulder.

  He did not move.

  She rolled him onto his back, and he sloshed like a half-filled cask. Water bubbled up out of his mouth. His eyes stared blankly at the gulls. And beneath his greatcoat he wore nothing but breeches and a cutlass.

  Not the dress of a civilized gentleman. She looked around at the other bodies, broken and bloated, dressed in rough clothes and rags. Pirates… honest men… She could not tell. Some of their faces were serene, sleeping peacefully in death. Others were twisted grotesquely, mirroring the last sight that had passed before their eyes.

  She staggered among the bodies, protected from the horror by a numbness, an icy cold that came, not from her wet clothes or the wind, but from within. She knelt beside this one, turned over that. She did not smell the gassy stink puffing from the mouths or recoil at the clammy flesh and stiffened limbs. She called for her Sam, but the only answer came from the gulls.