The Blind in Darkness

by Stephen Lewis

  “They have just arrived,” Catherine said, “on The Helmsford, now anchored next to the Governor’s new wharf.”

  Massaquoit balanced the spoon in his hand, studying its weight and its smooth surface. He dipped it into the samp and brought it back to his lips.

  “It is good,” he said.

  “The spoon?” asked Phyllis.

  “Both,” he replied.

  “I didn’t cook the spoon,” she said.

  Catherine began to smile. She enjoyed their interplay. But this morning her mood was somber as she recalled Woolsey’s visit last night. Her smile faded to a frown. Massaquoit noticed the change.

  “Master Woolsey came to see you last night,” he said.

  Phyllis let her spoon clatter to the table.

  “It is not natural,” she said, “the way you see everything. If you was white I would think you was a wizard on your way to a sabbat flying over poor Master Woolsey’s head, and him still troubled as he is with the pain in his arm so he can hardly straighten it.”

  “Yes,” he did, Catherine said, looking past Phyllis to Massaquoit.

  “He brought bad news?” Massaquoit asked.

  “Yes, I am afraid.” She placed her own spoon down on the table, very slowly, as though the downward movement of her hand might gather the conflicting thoughts that whirled in her head. As the spoon touched the wood of the table top the whirl did seem to stop and she was, for the moment, sure of the right course.

  “Perhaps you should stay home today,” she said.

  He studied her face looking for a clue to he intent.

  “What Mistress is trying to say,” Phyllis intruded, “is that because of what Master Woolsey said last night that people will fear for their scalps with you sitting behind them in the meeting house.”

  “He said no such thing,” Catherine said.

  “Not in so many words, he didn’t” Phyllis insisted, “but that was what he meant to say if he was not too much of a gentleman to use those exact words.”

  “Phyllis sometimes gives voice to her fancy,” Catherine said in a voice that was intended to quiet her servant.

  “Then how far does her fancy travel from the truth?” Massaquoit asked.

  “Yesterday two men in Westwood, not fifteen miles north of here, were out gathering wood. They did not return.”

  “I see,” Massaquoit said.

  “Dead in the snow, that’s how they found them,” Phyllis said. She glanced at her mistress, her mouth still open prepared to expand upon the description, to tell what the men were wearing, and how they had been killed, and by whom, but she stopped the flow of words and contented herself with making a clucking noise.

  “And because two English were killed you think I should stay home?”

  “That is what Master Woolsey suggested.”

  “And you?” he asked.

  “If you go you will encounter hostility.”

  “And if I hide myself, I will feed that hostility,” he said.

  She permitted a small smile to form on her lips.

  “I thought you might think so.” She pulled her cloak down from the peg next to the door.

  Phyllis gathered hers and threw it over her shoulders.

  “Foolishness,” she said, “that is what it is. Why he could stay here and help Edward mend that stool.”

  “Edward will do no work on the Lord’s day,” Catherine replied. “And Massaquoit will walk with us to meeting.”

  “Edward would enjoy the company, he would,” Phyllis muttered, but she opened the door and waited for Catherine and Massaquoit to pass through it. Catherine glanced up at the sky, which was dropping snow once again, and shook her head.

  “I must try to make my way to Isaac Powell’s house,” Catherine said. “I said I would be back to check on how his hand was mending, but the snow has been so heavy I have not. I will try to go today.”

  “If you would not mind the company,” Massaquoit said, “I will walk with you.”

  “Do you fear for me, then?” she asked.

  “Certainly not,” he said.

  “Then come along,” she replied.

  The snow was falling harder as they trudged to the meetinghouse. The wind blew the flakes against their faces so that they could barely see the road, trodden almost flat by those who had passed before them. Catherine and Phyllis, walking in front as they always did when accompanied by Massaquoit, kept their heads bowed and saw only their feet. Massaquoit, however, held one hand over his eyes so that he could still see a few feet ahead of him. That is why he saw the movement coming from behind a tree. He seized the arm that reached for him as he passed the tree and pulled.

  He was prepared for an assault, but he was not surprised when he saw instead of an English face the darker complexion of Wequashcook beneath his beaver hat. Wequashcook freed his arm from Massaquoit’s grip and motioned ahead to Catherine and Phyllis who were disappearing behind the curtain of snow.

  “Did she not warn you?” he asked.

  “She did,” Massaquoit replied.

  “And still you go to their meeting?”

  “I do.” He started to walk. “They will soon notice I am not with them.”

  “Yes, the English are marvelous for noticing, are they not?”

  “What is it you want?”

  “Only to add my warning to hers.”

  “It is pointless.”

  “Perhaps she does not know all of it.”

  “About the attack?”

  “There has been another. Last night. At the English’s farm where that boy was sent.”

  Massaquoit nodded, but kept walking. Wequashcook shook his head but matched his stride to Massaquoit’s.

  “You have not gotten any less stubborn,” he said.

  “Tell me what you have heard. I have not gotten any more stupid either.”

  “There is not much to tell. I was walking to meeting early this morning, like I always do, and I was behind the Thompson family. They did not notice me, because they were walking into the wind, like we are now, but the wind carried their voices back to me. That old man, Powell, he was found dead in his house. The boy has disappeared. Some say he killed his master. Others say Indians killed the old man and took the boy away.”

  “What do you say?”

  Wequashcook shrugged.

  “It could be either. The English sometimes kill each other. And sometimes Indians kill the English, as they sometimes kill us. It does not matter.” He pointed ahead to Catherine and Phyllis. “You know they will never trust us. I have traded many years with Thompson. But this morning, when the wind died down for a moment, and he heard my feet crunching the snow, he turned and stared at me as though he was seeing me for the first time. That is when I decided to wait for you.”

  “I do not know this Thompson,” Massaquoit replied. “But I know how he looked at you.”

  “Then you know all there is to know.”

  Massaquoit resumed walking, but now Wequashcook did not join him.

  “I have business elsewhere,” he said. “And if you were wise, you would tell your mistress that you must help me.”

  Massaquoit quickened his pace. When he glanced over his shoulder Wequashcook was gone. He caught up to Catherine and took her arm.

  “The man you intend to visit later is past your help,” he said.

  “He died? I did not think his hurt was mortal.”

  “That is not what killed him,” Massaquoit replied.

  Catherine nodded.

  “I see,” she said.

  “See what?” Phyllis inquired.

  “Old man Powell has been killed,” Catherine said.

  Phyllis looked hard at Massaquoit.

  “Where did you hear that? You did not know it at breakfast, and now I suppose you will say the wind told you.”

  “A man like the wind,” Massaquoit replied, “whispered it in my ear, just now.”

  “Well, I saw no such man,” Phyllis insisted.

  “Yet, he was here.�
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  “Do you not want to turn back?” Catherine asked.

  “No,” Massaquoit replied. “I have done nothing wrong.”

  * * * *

  A crowd was gathered in front of the meetinghouse when they arrived. They stood before one figure who appeared to be holding forth to such effect that his listeners ignored the wind driven snow that swirled about them. They had drawn their cloaks and coats tightly around them, and these garments were now turned white so that it was impossible to distinguish the men from the women. The children, however, obvious by their smaller stature stood off to one side of the knot of adults. The speaker, who was standing on the steps, looked over the crowd as Catherine, Phyllis and Massaquoit approached. He stopped speaking, and as he did, the people turned to follow his gaze. A murmur arose from them, barely discernible against the wind. But Catherine could hear it menace. She turned to Massaquoit.

  “There is still time,” she said. “Master Worthington is inciting their affections to a dangerous hatred.”

  He shook his head.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Phyllis said. “Do you not hear them?”

  “I hear the wind,” Massaquoit replied. “It is stronger than their voices.”

  “It’s not the wind you have to worry about,” she said. She turned to Catherine. “Mistress Williams, can you not speak sense to him?”

  Catherine shook her head slowly, not so much to respond to her servant’s question, but in anticipating the collision between Massaquoit’s stubborn pride, which would not permit him to back down from an angry group of English settlers, and the anger of those settlers, who soon would take note of his presence and see in him the reification of their nightmare fear of all Indians.

  “No,” she said now to Phyllis. “Certainly not. He will do what he will do. And we will take our places at meeting.” She nodded at Massaquoit as though to tell him that it was his decision to proceed, and that she would not try to dissuade him.

  He watched their two shapes, Catherine’s short and squat, and Phyllis’s a head taller but also broad shouldered, merge with the falling snow. Then he walked toward the front of the meetinghouse, keeping his eyes on the speaker who followed his progress toward him. He saw the crowd divide to permit Catherine and Phyllis to pass, and then it closed again. He approached the knot of people, who now formed an uneven line in front of the meetinghouse. He considered walking straight into their midst to provoke the confrontation he knew they wanted, but he dismissed that idea, not out of fear but because he did not want to give them the pleasure of assaulting him.

  With this judgment in mind, he quickened and lengthened his pace as though preparing to muscle his way through the crowd. He sensed, rather than saw, the stiffening of those immediately in his path. When he was close enough to a man in the middle of the line to see the fear in his eyes and to watch his breath explode in excited bursts in front of him, he stopped and held the man’s gaze for a second or two more before turning sharply to his right. A few strides brought him to the last citizen, an older woman who opened her mouth in a toothless sneer at him, and there he turned again, not proceeding a foot further than necessary to flank the woman. She turned her head to follow his movement toward the door of the meetinghouse, but neither she nor any of the others said anything, nor did they offer to resist his progress.

  Inside the building, he saw Catherine sitting on the front bench, as befitted her position as a rich widow, and further back, among the other servants, was Phyllis. He nodded at her as he went by to find his place on the bench at the rear where he was accustomed to endure the services in the company of Wequashcook and half a dozen other Indians, who with varying degrees of sincerity had embraced the English god. Today, however, he had the bench to himself. He shook the snow from his head, stomped it off his feet, rubbed his hands together, and sat down, these gestures designed to insist that even though the colonists had apparently decided that he was now a demon, he was a demon whose flesh still felt the cold of the snow.

  Usually, every place on the benches that crossed the square space of the meetinghouse from the altar to the rear wall would be filled with the settlers. Today, however, either because of the storm, or as Massaquoit surmised, because they were squeezing themselves more tightly together, the bench immediately in front of him remained empty until the very last moment before the service began. But just as Minister Davis climbed up to the pulpit, a young man in a ragged greatcoat so covered in snow that it looked as though he must have been sleeping outside during the storm, sat down on the very edge of that bench. He glanced at Massaquoit, and offered a crooked smile that revealed his missing front teeth. He held his gaze on Massaquoit until Minister Davis’s voice rumbled through the meetinghouse and the service began. As it did, Massaquoit settled himself, with an expression of bemused attention on his face, as he did every time he was obliged to sit through a service.

  Within a few moments, he heard snores rise from the young man in the greatcoat. He saw that the snow clinging to the coat had begun to melt and drip to the floor. Every few moments, a chunk of snow would be dislodged and fall with an audible splash. The young man’s breath gathered as he slept and then released through the gap in his teeth so that the snores from his nose found accompaniment in a whistling through his mouth. As these sounds grew louder, those congregants nearest Massaquoit turned toward him with looks of bitter displeasure, and although he gestured them in the direction of the young man, they seemed, somehow, to hold him responsible for this desecration of the service.

  He realized that the only sound he had heard for the last few moments was the breathing and snoring of the young man, that Minister Davis’s voice that had been floating above him in an aspirant arch toward the ceiling of the meetinghouse on its way, no doubt, to the ear of the English god, had now ceased. He turned to look at the minister, standing behind the massive carved oak pulpit, so that only his upper chest and head beneath its skull cap were visible, and his glance was returned by Davis who apparently had stopped talking so as to fix his eyes on him. One by one, the other members of the congregation turned to stare past the snoring young man at him. He returned each gaze as it reached him as though he were parrying the thrusts of sword blades. Catherine half rose out of her seat so she could see over those sitting behind her. She held Massaquoit’s eyes with hers, and then shook her head as if in sadness. With virtually every other person in the meetinghouse facing Massaquoit, Minister Davis began again to speak. As he did, the young man roused, rubbed his eyes, and looked toward the pulpit. Seeing everyone’s eyes looking past him at Massaquoit, he too, turned in that direction.

  “Sitting on the back bench, is Matthew, a savage we have fondly called a ‘praying Indian’ because he has not only abandoned his savage name for a Christian one, but he has also accepted Our Lord. But there are others of his kind who roam the woods, spilling the blood of our neighbors to remind us, surely, that our help is only in the Lord, and not in any human conviction or understanding of the reformation of a savage’s natural, brutish nature, however it might appear to be informed by Grace.”

  Catherine now stood as though to speak, although she knew that doing so would constitute a breach of decorum of the most serious magnitude. Minister Davis continued his pause as if he wanted to underscore his point, but he looked at Catherine and with an almost indiscernible nod of his head he conceded to her that he recognized that he was treading on dangerous grounds, that his words were becoming a lit match to the powder of his congregation’s fear and anger. She, in turn, reading the concession in his expression, shifted her eyes back to Massaquoit and then sat back down.

  Minister Davis again raised his voice.

  “Yes, we see the signs of Grace turning the affections of the benighted savage toward our Lord and salvation, and we must rejoice when we see the wondrous effects wrought by the Spirit.” He closed his eyes and nodded as though he were seeing this marvel with his mind’s eye at that moment.

  The congregation waited for him to continu
e, but a voice from the back of the meetinghouse filled the silence left by the minister.

  “I’m looking at this one savage right now, and all I see is a savage,” the voice declared. It belonged to the sleepy young man who had now roused himself fully and was pointing at Massaquoit, bringing his hand within six inches of Massaquoit’s face. Massaquoit studied that hand, noted the dirt encrusted between the fingers and the ragged fingernails, even the dead skin from a recent case of frostbite on the tip of the index finger pointed at him, and then with a gesture slow and almost regal, he pulled that hand down. The young man tried to resist, but his arm strength was not nearly enough to hold against Massaquoit’s force, and so he let his arm slap heavily against his side.

  “You see how he attacks me,” he cried.

  The congregation’s disparate voices, men and women, young and old, rose to agree. Minister Davis cleared his throat loudly in signal that he would resume speaking, but the rumbling voices only grew louder, although as yet no words separated themselves from the uneven waves of sound. When the words did take shape, they were simple.

  “No Christian, he,” the young man said above the waves, and then the voices of the congregation agreed. “Yea, no Christian, he,” they said.

  “A Christian would not kill a Christian, would he?” the young man cried out above the clamor.

  There was a stunned silence, and then a deep bass voice from the first row of the meetinghouse, where the well to do sat, boomed out “No.” Catherine looked at the owner of the voice, Samuel Worthington, the owner of the merchant vessel that had brought Thomas and his son up from Barbados. He had been embroiled in litigation about some spoiled cargo with John, just before her husband died, and he never encountered Catherine without his face betraying a residual bitterness at the fact that John had defeated him at court. And, in fact, he still had not paid the court ordered restitution to Catherine.

  He was flanked by the tall, athletic figure of his son Nathaniel on one side, and the shorter, more powerful figure of Lionel Osprey, a mercenary who had been with the English settlers in Jamestown where he had been given the rank of lieutenant, and now worked for the merchant. Osprey was holding his brass buttoned great coat tight about him. Catherine noted, almost idly, that the coat was missing a button, and she tried to recall whether she had heard if Osprey were married, and then she reminded herself that men who spent their lives as soldiers, far from the company of women, knew well how to handle a needle, although in the case of Lionel Osprey his thick hands looked more suitable for heavier, blunter implements. Worthington returned her glance with a satisfied smile. “No,” he repeated even louder. “Look to Mistress Williams’ savage and find blood in his heart if not on his hands.”