Cape Cod

by William Martin

  Dear Sister,

  I once told you that we were more alike than you thought, in our questions and our passions. And just as your passion undid you, mine has undone me.

  I will be blunt. There was in the parish a young woman named Samantha Kittredge, formerly of Yarmouth. She is the wife of Captain Hezekiah K., who works the coastal trade ’twixt Boston and New York and is away for many weeks at a time.

  In her loneliness, she came to me for Bible study. I was smitten, as, it seemed, was she. One night, while endeavoring to study Ecclesiastes, we came to study each other.

  I would have been the wiser to have taken her to some bower of bliss in the woods. But—here I speak frank—her hair was the golden color of marsh grass in September, and her lips, as they formed the holy words, were a communion I could not resist.

  The Reverend Mr. Stone discovered us in flagrante delicto. Samantha now wears a scarlet letter upon her breast and has moved to Truro. Her husband will not have her, and she is too mortified to return to Yarmouth. I was forced to beg public forgiveness and step down. I am undone and drifting. Father is devastated.

  Whatever order there was in Serenity’s life was torn away. There was discipline aplenty. Mr. Glint was not averse to using the whip when it pleased him. And there was structure for every day. But Lem’s letters had reminded her of her life’s center. Her boy had been cared for, and her father, and the flock of Harwich. Now she did not know if she pitied Lem or their father more.

  July 12, 1720

  Dear Sister,

  Father is dead. He was harvesting oysters near Billingsgate when a squall struck. His boat was found overturned, his body washed up on Lieutenant Island. May God have mercy on his soul.

  I fear that he welcomed the squall. We wounded him, you and I, and he spoke often of meeting God to discuss his failings. He was a simple man who believed simply, a strong man with strong faith.

  I must tell you that Bigelow has made an offer on the Eastham property. It is most generous, and as my indiscretion has left me without prospect, I need income, as will Goody Daggett in bringing up the boy.

  I am in no state to raise a child and have sent Ned to Billingsgate with Goody Daggett. By selling the Eastham property, I can guarantee their support.

  She cried for her father, though she had never expected that she would. She worried for her little boy. And she raged at her brother. She wrote back, urging him not to sell the land. Goody Daggett was resourceful, after all. And how could he do more business with the Bigelows, “who have a history of treachery dating from the First Comers?”

  October 9, 1720

  Dear Sister,

  It is done. Father made me the sole heir to the property, and I felt it necessary to sell. Half of the money have I given to Goody Daggett for Ned’s care. Half have I kept for myself. As for besmirching the Bigelows, I reject it totally. They are the only ones who have helped me.

  Through the good offices of Ezekiel, I have been given opportunity to redeem myself in an Indian parish at Cumassakumkanet, Sandwich. I will be assistant pastor to Amos Colt, Indian by heritage but a fine Christian. I intend to put thoughts of Samantha behind me and devote myself to the good of Mr. Colt’s flock. Their meetinghouse is a wooden Methuselah. Rebuilding it will be the first task of my new life.

  x.

  The following week, Solemnity went begging at the Bigelow law office, on the first floor of the Barnstable home that Brewster Bigelow had built in 1700, a monument to the wisdom of owning land and studying the law. It carried two full stories, with three roof dormers, and was painted a hard slate gray, but softened with buff-colored trim and green shutters. Between the Cape and Cambridge, Solemnity had seen no finer edifice, outside or in. There was pine wainscoting in every room, high ceilings, fine flocked English wallpapers, Turkey carpets, and French draperies pulled back to reveal the life of the town passing by.

  Barnstable was shire for the whole of Cape Cod, and it was not by chance that Brewster Bigelow had constructed his home directly across the road from the county courthouse. Any who needed assistance could not help but turn to a family who hung their shingle before such ordered beauty, and in Brewster and Ezekiel, they were seldom disappointed.

  Solemnity held his hat by the brim. His hands were blistered, his thumbnails blackened from working a hammer, his clothes here and there splattered with whitewash.

  Brewster looked him up and down. “Not what I would expect on a minister.”

  “I would have dressed in something more appropriate, but in a poor parish, the stipend does not allow for new clothes. And I try not to use the money from the Eastham property too quickly.”

  “Marshal it well.” The old man’s laugh turned into a cough that became a hack. Then he spat at the spittoon, which he missed, and not for the first time.

  “I am scrupulous,” said Solemnity.

  “See that you’re as scrupulous about Indian maidens. You’ve no more land to sell, should your codpiece come undone again.”

  Solemnity bit at his cheek to contain his anger at such condescension.

  Brewster peered at the document in front of him, saw something he did not like, and excised it with his quill. “Land is a powerful asset, boy. My father understood that. My son as well.”

  “Land is a treasure,” said Ezekiel, coming in from the adjoining office. “And how can we help one who has sold us so much?”

  Solemnity described the work on the meetinghouse. They had sawed, nailed, painted. All they lacked was a new stepping-stone, the old step being wood that had rotted away. He said that as a boy, he had discovered a stepping-stone buried at the barn on Jack’s Island, and he sought permission to dig it up.

  “A damn nest of subversion, that barn,” said Brewster. “Doesn’t surprise me a bit to see what you’ve come to, you and your sister, considerin’ the line of blasphemers and heretics you come from. They never deserved to own that island.”

  “May we have the stepping-stone?” asked Solemnity, as solemnly as he could.

  “Take it. But nothing else, not even hay straw for your horse. That island’s Bigelow property again, as it always should have been.”

  Ezekiel spoke more gently. “See Shearjashub. He lives in the main house.”

  “You have my thanks.”

  “There may come a day when you can do something for us.” Ezekiel pulled a half crown from his waistcoat pocket and flipped it to Lem, who barely caught it before it hit his nose.

  “Buy yourself a new suit of clothes to wear when you come to Barnstable.”

  Solemnity weighed the money in his hand, then put it into his pocket and left.

  Through the open window he could hear Brewster Bigelow’s cough doing battle with a tired old laugh. Brewster would cough himself to death not many months later. It would be said that he died a happy man, though his happiness would be measured in acres rather than friends.

  xi.

  The next day, Solemnity rose at suncoming and borrowed Amos Colt’s horse cart. He did not say where he was going, because the new stepping-stone was to be a surprise.

  It was an exquisite October day, a port wine day, he called it, when cranberry and bearberry, maple and oak, even poison ivy, came a deep, rich red. But as the leaves turned, trees across the Cape were being burned to make more pasture. Their smoke smudged the blue and tinged the air with the scent of passing time. And somewhere high above, a flight of geese honked their way south.

  Lem envied them their freedom and wished, in a way, that he could be like them: “Consider the birds of the air…” But he could not be like them. He could not leave. His sin condemned him to service, and who better to serve than the Indians? Who else would have him?

  But many thoughts crossed a man’s mind on a five-hour cart ride, and even a minister might commit a few of the seven deadly sins if he had an active imagination.

  Pride came first. The Bigelows had wounded Lem’s pride often. And never more grievously than the day before. He cursed himself for asking f
avors of men who had swindled his family while handing out half crowns of false pity.

  And from pride flowed anger. He had been sorely tempted to throw that half crown right back in Ezekiel’s face. Or stuff it down Brewster’s rasping throat. He hated the Bigelows for their condescension and scheming. He envied their success and money.

  Pride, anger, hate, envy… the antidote for these was more pleasant contemplation, but even that could lead to sin. Solemnity counseled that when temptation crossed the mind, one should think on the transcendent love of God. He tried, but thoughts of God’s love were less appealing than those of Samantha Kittredge.

  He considered her ocean-blue eyes and warm smile, her skill with a blueberry pie, and her insights into Scripture. She had seen things in Ecclesiastes that surpassed the knowledge of the greatest scholars. But inevitably his mind settled on the smoothness of her thighs, the rise of her nipples against his lips, the unspeakable bliss of entering her body. Even on the cart board, he could feel himself stiffening in his breeches.

  He willed her images from his mind, but they did not stay away for long. And eventually, he surrendered. It was lust, yes, the fifth deadly sin of the journey, but he loved her in other ways as well. And it pained him beyond words, sometimes beyond endurance, to think he would never be able to have her.

  At Jack’s Island his pain was magnified like a beam of sunlight passing through a glass. This had been his family’s refuge from the prying eyes of the colony. Had he owned it now, he would have made it his refuge as well, a place to go with Samantha, to satisfy his love and, yes, his lust.

  But the Bigelows had traversed the marsh with a sandy road, the better to move off the corn, cattle, fish, and whale oil. They had stripped most of the trees that Jack Hilyard had left, so that even on a port wine day, there was a barrenness about the place that Solemnity had never known as a boy. The cattle chewed wherever greenery grew. The picked-over cornstalks waved sadly in the breeze. Puffs of topsoil blew into the dry October air.

  There was no refuge here, he thought. In truth a man could go to the ends of the earth and find no refuge from the eye of God.

  He spent little time on the island. He found it too painful, and he liked Shearjashub and his sons no more than any other Bigelows. He went straight to the barn behind Jack Hilyard’s saltbox and dug until he had freed the square-cut piece of granite all around.

  With long bars, Shearjashub’s sons levered the stone out of the sand. With brute strength born of ignorance, they lifted it onto the cart. Then they went back to their work. They were not ordinarily hospitable, and they had all voted to remove the Reverend Mr. Hilyard from their parish after he was taken in adultery. They offered him neither drink, conversation, nor comment upon the strange lettering across the face of the stone:

  Beneath this were a dozen more scrawls.

  Lem knew something of Wampanoag writing, which was more a series of pictures than sounds, but he recognized nothing of the symbols he had revealed when he brushed the sand away from the rock. Who had drawn them? An Indian tribe long gone? But what tribe built in granite? Indians built nothing to last. They believed that only the earth lasted.

  He had preached to them that only God lasted. But as he battled each day with his thoughts, he had begun to believe that only love lasted.

  He made for home. Night came on. The stars turned out. He felt their cold gaze and wondered. What could God care of the earth in the majesty of the universe? What did God care for the devotion of the colony in the black enormity of the continent? Would God care if a minister chose love over holy loneliness? Was this strangely marked piece of granite a stepping-stone to God’s stars or a penitential weight he would carry through his life, as meaningless as the letters drawn upon it?

  He stopped the wagon. He was not far from home. The air still smelled of brush fires and carried the honking of the geese that flew both day and night because the season fled fast.

  With his shovel, he levered the stone off the back of the cart, and it thumped into the sand. Someone would find it and perhaps use it well. Then he turned toward Truro and the woman he loved.

  xii.

  There was no one to greet Serenity when she was released from the workhouse two years later. Goody Daggett had grown too feeble to travel. Solemnity and his woman had long since disappeared. And none of the good people of Eastham would welcome her, let alone bring her back. So Goody Daggett and the little boy sent her a bundle of clothes and enough money for passage home.

  The clean skirt, apron, and shawl felt strange and wonderful, a foretaste of the freedom that came when Gideon Glint’s door closed behind her for the last time. She walked the two miles to Boston, breathing deep of the smells of wood smoke, horse dung, and low tide that hung like fog over the steeples and hills of the grandest town in America.

  At Long Wharf, she arranged passage with a fishing captain. Then she bought a whole cone of sugar. She broke off a little piece and let it melt on her tongue, sweet communion with freedom. The rest she wrapped in paper and put under her arm. Then she went to the Old South Meeting House and asked for a colleague minister, the Reverend Thomas Prince, of whom she had heard in her travels about the kitchens of Boston.

  At Harvard, Prince had begun to accumulate books and papers related to the history of the colonies. Now he had created, in the steeple room of the church, a collection of antiquities he called the New England Library.

  Serenity had little trust for churchmen, but she needed knowledge to make her plans and so would risk what information she had. Besides, Prince was a Cape Codder by birth, and that counted for something.

  “What kind of book is it that you have knowledge of?” asked the Reverend Mr. Prince.

  “In truth, ’tis not knowledge.”

  “Then what?” He was a young man, not yet out of his thirties, but already balding and bad-tempered.

  “I’ve heard stories about the log of Master Jones.”

  Prince gave her a blank stare, made all the blanker by the backs of the books that surrounded him. “Is this a name I should take to heart?”

  “Christopher Jones, sir, of the Mayflower.”

  The demeanor of Mr. Prince seemed instantly to change. He closed the book before him and leaned across his desk. “The Mayflower?”

  She nodded slightly, as though uncertain of what she was telling him.

  “You’ve heard legends? From whom?”

  She gave a nervous little laugh, revealing the brown edges of decay around her teeth. She was only twenty-three, but five years of servitude had aged her quickly. “I worked in so many places, Your Honor, ’tis hard to remember.”

  Prince furrowed his brow and studied her with a hard minister’s eye. “Do you waste my time, woman?”

  “Oh, no, sir. No, indeed.” She fiddled with fringe on her shawl.

  “No… I don’t think you do.” He went to one of the bookcases behind him and pulled down a vellum-bound book. “Here is a journal begun near the same time as the Mayflower log, if there be such a thing.”

  He placed it on the table in front of her. “The memories of William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony for most of its existence. Borrowed from the family.”

  She ran her hand over the smooth leather. It seemed to be in perfect condition. Then she opened it. The pages were filled with a small, tight script, entirely legible.

  “Have you ever seen a book of this vintage? Or felt such rough paper? A century old?”

  She shook her head.

  “Are you certain? Such a volume could be worth hundreds of pounds.”

  This was what she wanted to know. She would spend the packet ride balancing those hundreds of pounds against the revenge that she had long plotted on the Bigelows. They had taken her family’s land for a pittance, for two pittances, and she had been unable to stop them. She had no certainty that the log would discomfit them, but they might pay to protect the memory of their Mayflower ancestor. Would they pay hundreds of pounds?

  “Where mig
ht one sell such a book?” she asked.

  “To this library,” answered Prince. “Do you have it?”

  She shook her head again.

  “On your honor?”

  “My honor?” She laughed at that.

  He leaned close to her. “You will go far toward redeeming it, should you bring the book to a place where history and scholarship are honored.”

  She smiled. “If I find it.”

  xiii.

  The little boy did not at first recognize her. He was playing in the sand beside the shack when she came over the dune.

  “Hello, Ned.”

  He stood and stepped back.

  “I’m your mama.”

  “My mama’s in jail.”

  “I… I brung you a present.” She reached into her apron and pulled out the sugar.

  The little boy eyed the gift, but still he would not go to her.

  Then Goody Daggett came out of the cottage. She had tried to prepare the boy for his mother’s return, but for five years, he had connected his mother with long journeys to a barn near Boston. Goody Daggett gestured for Serenity to remove her shawl.

  The covering fell away, so that the low November sun struck the side of Serenity’s face.

  “Mama!” The word burst joyously now, and they ran to each other’s arms.

  She clung to him as though he were life itself, and from this time forward, he would be. She had refused to cry for five years, but she could contain her tears no longer. She had returned to what was left of her family. And she would never leave.

  “Don’t cry, Mama,” said Little Ned.

  She wiped her nose on the back of her sleeve. She wiped her hand down the front of her new skirt. Then she crumbled off a piece of sugar and popped it into the little boy’s mouth.

  By moonlight she went once more to Cornhill, though this time she went alone. She did not dig far before she found the rush basket. With shaking hands and cold-stung fingers, she pulled it out of its hiding place, then plunged her arm into the ancient corn. She reached to the bottom, then to the sides. She ran her arm all around. Then…