The Sea Hath Spoken

by Stephen Lewis

  THE SEA HATH SPOKEN

  Stephen Lewis

  Chapter One

  The first thing Massaquoit noticed as he approached Newbury Harbor was the sound of the gulls. Ordinarily, he would expect to find two or three circling the waters at first light searching for a school of minnows or other small fish. Perhaps one would offer its hoarse cry to scare off a competitor for a crab washed up on the beach. But this morning, their cries rose as though in pitched battle. And as he made the last turn on the path leading to the harbor he saw two or three dozen of them swooping down and landing in the eddying water where the waves broke against the shore. Wings beating and bills darting they fought for the best position from which to feed on the body.

  He broke into a trot and clapped his hands as he approached. One gull snatched something floating near the body and flew up with it in its mouth. Massaquoit watched the gull work its wings hard, lifting itself against the weight of what it carried in its beak, and then it was gone. Several of the remaining gulls looked at Massaquoit and then rose reluctantly, but the others cawed at him as though he were just another, oversized bird looking to compete for breakfast. He stooped to pick up a four foot long piece of driftwood, which he swung over his head as he reached the water’s edge. Two gulls, one on each side of the body, pecked at each other, while the others flew off. With a final jab of its beak, one of the fighting gulls discouraged the other, which took off. The one that remained stared stubbornly at Massaquoit and then pecked its beak defiantly into the dead man’s flesh. Massaquoit swung the wood at the bird and caught it on the side of the head. It fell off and floated a few feet away. Out of the corner of his eye he saw something down the beach. He turned in that direction. A figure darted into the water, bent down, and then ran off. Massaquoit knelt and grabbed the feet of the man who had so attracted the birds’ attention. He pulled him onto dry land.

  The man was dressed as a sailor. The exposed skin of his face, neck, and hands had been shredded by the gulls’ beaks. Massaquoit leaned over him with his cheek above what was left of the man’s mouth. He waited until he was sure that there was no breath. The acrid smell of brine, along with the miasma of the decaying reeds in which he had been floating, rose from the corpse. He put his nose closer, and the sweet scent of rum greeted his nose..

  He heard feet running toward him, and he stood up. A middle aged English approached to within ten feet and stopped. The man did not look anxious to come any closer.

  “What have you there, Matthew?”

  “A dead English,” Massaquoit replied.

  The man was sweating more than he should in the mild morning air. He looked past Massaquoit toward the hulking shape of The Good Hope, tied up at the dock.

  “That is your mistress’s ship,” he said. “Do you think he fell in?” the man asked.

  “I do not know,” Massaquoit replied. “The gulls were feeding on him when I arrived.”

  “Indeed, that is peculiar,” the man said. He came close enough to see the mangled flesh of the dead man, and he brought his hand to his mouth, and turned away. Massaquoit sensed movement coming towards him from the dock. A man wearing a coat adorned by brass buttons, followed by another whose gray hair and stolid bearing suggested someone used to responsibility were trotting towards him. Behind them came an ordinary sailor. Massaquoit recognized the man in the coat as Martin Gregory, the master of the ship, which was owned by Catherine Williams. He guessed that the other man must be the ship’s mate. The ship had docked several days before and Massaquoit, sitting in front of his wigwam on a hot afternoon, had seen the captain accompany the young English man and woman to Mistress Williams’ door.

  * * * *

  Captain Gregory had heard a commotion on deck some time during the middle of the night. The windows and doors to his cabin had been open to capture what little breeze might slice through the hot and heavy air. He did not pay particular attention to the voices, as they seemed to be two or three sailors in a drunken argument. He was a strict taskmaster, ordinarily, but this had been a particularly difficult voyage from England in his ship, which was better equipped for the coastal trade up and back between Newbury and the Carribean Islands, and he had lost one man to fever when becalmed in mid-passage, and another overboard during a violent storm just two days before reaching Newbury Harbor. So, he was inclined to let the fracas work itself out without his intervention. He tried to get back to sleep, hoping his first mate would deal with the situation. The voices stopped and he began to drift off, when he thought he heard one more cry and then a splash. He sat up in his bed and waited. He heard feet walking away, nothing more. He was very tired, and lay back down. He was not sure that he had not dreamed the episode.

  A knock on his door a couple of hours woke him, and his mate stood there, his lined face serious.

  “You had better come have a look,” the mate said. “One of our men has got himself drowned. There must be a hundred hungry gulls at him.”

  Now the captain stared down at the man. The face was so badly disfigured he was not sure who he was looking at.

  “That’s young Billy Lockhart,” the mate, who had accompanied the captain, said. “Isn’t he Henry?” He looked to the sailor for confirmation. Henry, a young man barely out of his teens, and sporting a dark purple bruise beneath his eye, inched toward the body and leaned toward it as though afraid to get too close. He nodded his head and then turned away.

  “He was a wild one,” the mate said, “ no doubt about that. I don’t wonder if he just fell overboard after drinking a bit too much.”

  “I heard a noise outside my cabin,” Gregory replied. “Some time during the night.” He was about to continue when he turned toward Henry. “Tell me lad, how did you get that bruise?”

  “I were not in any fight,” Henry replied. “Not with him anyway,” he pointed at the body.

  “Well, come then,” Gregory insisted.

  Henry’s lips quivered but he did not speak. The mate leaned toward him, and Henry whispered into his ear.

  “The lad is ashamed,” the mate said. “It seems he sneaked off the boat, and there was this woman, who was already...”

  “Enough,” Gregory snapped. He looked from the dead man to the young sailor. “You will know better in the future, I trow.”

  “Aye,” Henry replied.

  Gregory turned to his mate.

  “Did you not hear anything?”

  “Aye, that I did, too,” the mate said. “And when I went to see what the trouble was a couple of the boys was having a disagreement, but Billy was not there with them. He liked his own company when he had a bottle, he did.”

  Gregory nodded.

  “Well, he is very much alone now, isn’t he? Without a bottle, facing his God.”

  The mate lowered his head.

  “He is that,” he said. “As for that, I do not doubt that those Quakers we had on board might have had something to do with this. They are witches, you know. Could have cast a spell on Billy. Out of envy at the joy he took in his life.”

  Captain Gregory’s frown suggested his desire to distance himself from speculation.

  “Does he have kin?” Gregory asked.

  “Not that I knows of,” the mate replied.

  “We have room in our graveyard,” the constable interjected, “if he was a good Christian, that is.”

  “As to that, I cannot attest,” Gregory said, “but I trust Mistress Williams would want one of her own properly put to rest.”

  “As you want, sir,” the constable said. “I will see to it.”

  The captain turned, and followed by the mate, returned to the ship. Henry, though, lingered a few feet away.

  “Do you mind waiting with him?” the constable asked Massaquoit, with a nod to
ward the body.

  “No, I don’t,” Massaquoit said. “I do not feel his spirit anywhere near.”

  The constable shrugged and walked off. Massaquoit waited until he had disappeared behind a turn in the path, and then knelt again to look at the body. Henry approached and looked down at the body.

  “Did you not find anything on it?” he asked Massaquoit.

  “No.”

  “He had a leather pouch he wore around his waist. I was thinking there might be something about his family in it.”

  “I thought he had none.”

  Henry sneered.

  “As for that, do you think them officers know about us sailors, or that we tell them what they don’t have no business knowing?”

  Massaquoit studied the young sailor, his face aging from overexposure to the sun.

  “I found nothing,” he repeated.

  “Aye. I imagine it must be at the bottom of the water,” Henry said, and then he walked off toward the ship.

  * * * *

  Catherine looked to the door of the meetinghouse as though she could will the latch to turn. Captain Gregory, sitting between Catherine on one side, and Magistrate Joseph Woolsey on the other, shifted his angular body on the bench next to her as though he was unable to find a comfortable position. Catherine turned toward him and a small smile fought against the tension in her jaws, a tension that had been growing with each moment the door remained closed, while Minister Davis, too, waited.

  “I do not think they attend meeting as we do,” Catherine said.

  “My mate thinks they cast a spell on Billy, that poor lad, and that is why he fell into the water and drowned.”

  Catherine saw no humor in his eyes, but then he was a man who faced life as though it were a series of storms through which he must navigate his ship, leaving no time for levity.

  “What think you?” she asked.

  “I know that the lad was a favorite of the young woman. And that the lad could not control his thirst. It is most like that he was drunk, and in the fog, for there was a mist on the water last night, he stumbled, lost his balance and fell.”

  “I fear we may never know more than that,” Catherine replied, and then she glanced again at the door. “Did they dine with you?” she asked.

  “Indeed, the young man did, as befits their status. But the young woman had such a terrible voyage, keeping to her cabin until we had cleared the Canary Islands. Why I did not lay eyes on her before we were almost half way across. Billy took her meals to her.”

  “And was her brother prompt to meals?” Woolsey asked.

  “Aye, that he was.”

  “Perhaps then he has a larger appetite for food than to hear God’s Holy Word preached as it should be. People say that at their meetings there is no preaching.”

  “No more of that, Joseph Woolsey,” Catherine chided. “Let us judge their actions, not rumors about their sect.”

  Captain Gregory stretched against the back of the bench on which he sat. He seemed ill at ease.

  “But perhaps you can sit more at your ease if you did not have to balance your hat,” Woolsey offered.

  “Yes, it is a grand hat,” Catherine said, thankful for the distraction. The air in the meeting house still carried the rich aroma of the newly worked wood of the board that now ran along the side walls. Most of the pegs on the board held hats or an occasional cloak, but Catherine noted a couple of free ones toward the very back on the wall nearest where she sat. She pointed in that direction, and Captain Gregory smiled his thanks as he rose to his feet, carrying his tricornered and plumed hat . He walked in a wide legged gait, more appropriate for the rolling deck of a ship than the plank floor he now crossed, and found an empty hook toward the rear of the building. He brushed his hat off and just as he turned to regain his seat, the door flung open and in walked Roger and Jane Whitcomb, the brother and sister whose arrival he and Catherine had been so anxiously awaiting.

  Catherine felt herself tense. She had heard about some of the Quakers’ strange practices, and she feared an immediate disturbance. The young man was wearing a broad brimmed, high crowned hat. Catherine waited for his hands to move toward his head but they did not. Instead, he took his sister’s elbow as they made their way toward Catherine. They arrived, just as Captain Gregory did, and there was a moment’s confusion as the three stood not certain who should sit down. Captain Gregory stepped back and gestured toward a space on a bench several rows back.

  “Master Whitcomb,” he said with a slight nod, “I can hear as well from there.”

  “That space will suffice for us, thank you kindly Captain,” Roger said. Catherine’s eyes fastened on Roger’s hat until he sensed her glance, and his face reddened.

  “You need not worry, Mistress Williams,” he said, “whatever you might have heard about our ways, we know how to show proper respect to God in His House.” He lifted his hand to the brim and with a slow, graceful movement, he pulled his hat to his side, revealing his thick black hair. As if in sympathy, his sister raised her hand to her head and pulled at the strands of bright red hair that strayed from beneath her bonnet. She offered a quick, tentative smile that brightened her delicate face for a second, and then they walked back to the bench Captain Gregory had been looking at and found seats on the side of it closest to the wall. The brother located an available peg, and put his hat on it.

  Minister Davis had been watching with an expression on his face somewhere between amusement and exasperation as the beginning of his service was delayed by the tardy arrival of the newcomers whom the whole town had been waiting to see.

  “Mistress Williams,” he said, in his deep, authoritative voice, “I see that your guests have joined us. I trust they are well bestowed and ready to join our service.”

  Catherine felt caught off guard. Minister Davis did not usually interrupt himself at the beginning of meeting in such a manner as this. The colony was growing and it was not at all uncommon for new arrivals, either permanent or transitory, to attend a Sunday service. In fact, permanent Newbury residents were compelled, by law, to worship whether their hearts were involved or not. So, Catherine could only wonder what moved the minister to make a special case out of her guests. A moment’s reflection brought his motive to mind, and a second later a comment from behind her confirmed her conclusion.

  “They do say,” a woman’s voice said in tones louder than were necessary to communicate with her immediate neighbor, “that they are members of that new sect.”

  “You don’t mean,” her neighbor, another woman, replied.

  “Verily.”

  “Quakers in Newbury,” the neighbor said. This last was said even louder, and rose above the heads of the waiting congregants to fill the meetinghouse with fear and loathing. All eyes now turned to Roger and Jane, sitting with expressionless faces.

  Catherine stood up and glanced back at the two women, both of them in their forties, good wives of Newbury, smug beneath caps starched for Sunday.

  “They, and I, await you,” Catherine said, with her gaze aimed hard and bright at the two women although her remark was addressed to the minister.

  “Well, then,” Minister Davis said, “let us begin.”

  From his seat at the rear of the meeting house Massaquoit watched with amusement in his mind but a passive expression on his face. He had now been living among the English for more than ten years, ever since Catherine Williams had chosen him from all his fellow sachems to live. The others had been dumped into the sea while he had gone to live as Catherine’s servant, although she had never treated him as such. He lived in a wigwam under a tree behind her house. Over the years that he had been there he had contemplated trying the English style of living in their large wooden structures with many walls and doorways and stairs to higher levels. Catherine had often invited him into her house, but he had refused. It was not that he did not recognize the advantages of such a structure, especially in the middle of a severe New England winter. He might warm his feet better by a fireplace
inside Catherine’s house, just as he could cook better with an English iron kettle, or cut better with an English steel knife. But the simple, and essential fact, was that he was not English, and he had no intention of becoming absorbed into that culture as had his companion sitting to his right.

  Wequashcook, too, had noted the disturbance caused by the newcomer’s arrival. He nudged Massaquoit with his elbow, but his face, too, remained an impassive mask. He sat next to Massaquoit because the last bench in the meetinghouse was reserved for those Indians who had accepted Christ and had become good enough Christians to attend services, but not quite enough to permit them to mingle with the English Christians sitting in front of them. And on the bench reserved for them, there was just enough room for the dozen or so Indian congregants, and Wequashcook and Massaquoit found themselves side by side partially out of choice in recognition of their long and tangled history, and partly in preference to other possible neighbors, men and women whose spirits long ago had been crushed or who had heartily adopted the white people’s god. Massaquoit made just enough pretense to such a conversion to permit him to maintain his relationship with Catherine while Wequashcook offered a more aggressive assimilation into the English faith so as to better promote his business interests. Neither was sincere, and neither respected the other’s motives, but still, somehow, they felt closer to each other than they did to the other Indians sitting with either blank faces or exaggerated joy in their expressions.

  Minister Davis looked out over his congregation, pausing as he always did on that last bench where the Indians sat as though to insist on his policy of inclusion of all those in his meetinghouse. He was preaching today on the question of sanctification, and how it followed justification in turning God’s elect away from sin and toward Christ’s model of goodness.

  “By your acts shall you be known,” the minister intoned, “for a natural man can wallow only in his sin like a hog in the mud until he is cleansed by God’s saving grace.”

  He paused, as he frequently did, for emphasis, waiting until the words he deemed most portentous had had an opportunity to penetrate the rational functions of his auditors. Like most New England Puritans ministers, he believed that human reason had been corrupted, but not destroyed, by Original Sin, and that preaching God’s word could still have a positive effect, for its light was bright enough to shine through the dismal, sin induced fog that enshrouded his congregation’s minds. He tapped his finger on the open page of the huge Bible on the lectern behind which he stood and observed the nodding heads and brightening eyes until he was satisfied that his point had been well received and he could go on. Yet just as he opened his mouth to continue, he became aware of a stirring to his right, and there, several rows behind Catherine Williams, Roger Whitcomb stood up.