Tidewater: A Novel of Pocahontas and the Jamestown Colony

by Libbie Hawker

  He came from the deck of his ship. The palisade gate opened with a hoarse creak, and Argall moved through the crowd of gaping, silent English at a near jog, his stern, intense eyes locked with Pocahontas’s own.

  She cried out when she saw him, a high keen of rage as lonely as a wolf’s howl.

  Argall took her by the shoulders, held her tightly in his strong hands.

  “Let me go! Take me home!”

  “Calm yourself, girl.”

  “I won’t! Take me home, you crow, you manitou!” She did not know whether the words came out in Real Tongue or in English. Or both, perhaps. She breathed deeply several times, gasping, a fish pulled abruptly into a night hunter’s canoe. She wrestled with the words on her tongue, sorting them into English so he would understand. “You told Japazaws you would trade me to my father.”

  Argall grimaced. His words sounded almost regretful. “In truth, Princess, I told Japazaws no such thing.”

  “What?”

  “He suggested the trade to me, but I gave no word indicating what I would do with you.”

  She tried to pull away from him, but his grip was as cold and unbreakable as steel.

  “Listen to me, Princess. I will trade you, and no mistake, for you are no good to me here, running about Jamestown like Bathsheba on the roof. But we must wait.”

  “For what? For how long?”

  “Until the time is right. Until you can be leveraged for maximum effect.”

  She did not know these last words. They meant nothing to her, except for the raw, piercing certainty that whenever Argall might deign to return her to Orapax, it would not be anytime soon.

  “Oh!” She dropped to her knees in the damp soil. The talons she had aimed at Argall flew like arrows to her face. She raked herself until her cheeks were scratched and torn.

  “God’s wounds,” Argall cursed. “Where is Mary? Somebody fetch the widow Mary!”

  Pocahontas threw back her red-streaked face and wailed at the uncaring sky. “Kocoum!”

  Soft arms wrapped around Pocahontas’s shoulders and a familiar scent surrounded her like a soft-furred pelt: the well-worn linen of Mary’s nightdress, the oily, warm smell of her copper-colored hair.

  “Come now, child, stand up,” Mary said. “Stand up. Don’t carry on this way. It’s not proper.”

  “Kocoum! Kocoum!”

  “What in the name of Christ is a kocoum?” Argall muttered.

  Somehow she was raised to her feet, and was led, stumbling, back toward the cabin. Mary’s wool blanket was wrapped about her shoulders and the woman’s gentle touch guided her blind progress. Pocahontas gasped and choked on breath hot with the surety of loss. Inside the cabin with its terrible straight walls and its roof like a confining lid, in its dark, cramped prison, Mary eased Pocahontas onto the bed. She crawled with her beneath the blanket and lay holding her, rocking her gently, cooing and singing as a mother does to a restless child.

  In time her gasping sobs eased and the well of tears ran dry—if not the ocean of sorrow. Pocahontas slept in Mary’s arms.

  Her spirit walked the dreamworld, traveling a blue path through a forest shaded in violet. She found the trail that led to a familiar clearing. At its heart stood her longhouse, far on the fringes of Orapax, the sound of the falls whispering on the air.

  She ducked through the door flap and found Kocoum sitting alone beside the heart fire. On the ground beside him lay the fine bag she had woven. Along its strap, the red strands of dyed grass linked and twined like the hands of lovers.

  “Kocoum,” her spirit called.

  He looked up, looked through her, saw nothing. The light of the heart fire edged his braided knot with the golden flicker of torches on the river, of night fishers moving on a silent current. The light colored his ears with a red glow and she smiled as her misty blue fingers caressed one ear, tugging it affectionately, then traced the shape of his sharp cheek and his strong, stoic jaw.

  “Mischief?” he said into the darkness. But his voice sounded uncertain. It was already fading.

  When she woke in the afternoon, groggy and sick, cramped on the hard straw mattress, Pocahontas knew the dream was true. It was a vision sent by the cruel, unfathomable god. This was her punishment, her penance for the horrors her selfish ambition had unleashed upon Tsenacomoco.

  She blinked at the posts of Mary’s bedstead, which were as upright and stern as the spirit posts at the four corners of a temple. Mary had hung Pocahontas’s apron from one of the posts. She reached for it, pulled it onto her lap, and smoothed it atop the woolen blankets. The doeskin was as soft as the velvet of an antler. When she pressed it to her face, the smell of home flooded her senses: pine smoke and moss, the hard earth floor, bundles of herbs that hung drying by the door. She smelled wolfskin and deer hide, the sweetness of woven mats, the salt of dried fish, and the unchanging, wholesome richness of mix-pot stew.

  And Kocoum. Him most of all.

  Pocahontas rocked as she cried, holding the apron close.

  In her heart, she knew she would never see Kocoum again.

  Reverend Whitaker smiled softly as he caressed the worn black leather of his Bible. He was always smiling. He seemed to gaze upon the world with the soft, half-focused stare and benign innocence of a babe in a cradleboard. Pocahontas eyed him warily from across the chapel, where she sat on a rough-hewn bench, as rigid as an oak stump. The small table in front of her was stained and pocked with the markings of ships’ boys who, having grown bored in their lessons, had taken knives to the planks while the reverend was distracted.

  The reverend, she quickly learned, was often distracted. After lecturing her on the nature and preferences of the tassantassa gods, especially the one called Christ, he would instruct Pocahontas to pray. Pray did not mean wading into the river to feel the spirits of current and air against her naked skin. Pray did not mean chanting, nor dancing at the fireside, nor entering the sweat lodge to hear the voice of the Okeus. Pray was not tobacco smoke, circles of cornmeal, tassels of weasel- and snakeskins. Instead, for the tassantassa priest, to pray was to sit with hands folded and head bent, staring at the tabletop, hearing nothing but the creaking silence of the Jamestown chapel, thinking nothing, doing nothing, and feeling nothing, save for the ache in her neck. Pray made her wish she had a knife of her own, to stab at the little table that held her like a rabbit in a snare.

  Often while praying, she would peer through the hanging fringe of her hair, and find Reverend Whitaker standing and gazing up into the rafters, hands clasped behind his back, his neat, ash-colored beard trembling as he muttered to himself. When he was lost in his own thoughts, the reverend noticed nothing of the world about him. He was as lost among the world of the spirits as a priest of the Real People smoking in his temple. Then Pocahontas would lift her head, work the cramp from her shoulders, and unclasp her hands and stretch them, letting the air of the chapel cool the sweat of her palms. Sometimes the reverend would see one of her small movements and glance her way as if surprised by her presence. But he never scolded her for ending prayer early. He only smiled at her.

  Pocahontas blinked and focused on the words as Reverend Whitaker read from the Bible.

  “. . . delivering thee from the people, and from the Gentiles, unto whom I now send thee, to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith which is in me.”

  Oh, yes. It was this tale once more. It was the reverend’s favorite theme: the duty of all tassantassas to tell other peoples of Christ. Pocahontas sighed. She gazed out the narrow window of the chapel as the reverend’s soft, easy voice slid through the warm air. Summer was at its full height, the sky pale with heat in midday. Jamestown lay subdued by the sun’s rays; the dingy smoke from its chimneys seemed to ripple and dance in the heat mirage that hung
like a curse over the growing town.

  Sweat gathered in her armpits and clung beneath her high collar, stiffening the fabric of her dress. Only after many weeks had Mary been able to coax Pocahontas into a semblance of a white woman’s garb, though in truth it was not Mary who convinced her. Pocahontas had begun to notice how men leered at her, staring at her bare chest and legs with an intensity she had only seen before in Kocoum’s face. She eyed the men carefully, watching them move through the lanes of Jamestown from a crack of the shutter on the cabin’s lone window. It was true that Englishmen looked at most of the women they passed, sometimes even turning their heads to stare after the women if they thought their impertinence would not be noted. But few of them stared at the other women with the unsettling, avid eyes they turned on her.

  And so she had finally acquiesced to Mary’s gentle prodding and allowed the woman to dress her as an Englishwoman.

  Mary did not have the finest garments—something she apologized for with much clucking and tutting as she shook skirts and sleeves in the sunshine, beating wrinkles and dust from the wool. But they would do.

  Pocahontas was made to stand still with her arms outstretched while Mary tried this bit of fabric or that, letting out laces, tucking in folds. At last she stepped back, nodded, and said with a proud smile, “There you are, Princess! Now just try a few steps, see how it all feels.”

  Pocahontas lowered arms that felt as if they had been wrapped in coils of birch bark. Elbows and wrists refused to bend. When she forced them to move against the strange stiffness of the cloth, gathers of wool pinched at her sensitive skin. The skirt was as heavy as a dozen gourds of water, and it dragged about the floor, catching beneath her bare toes, for she could not manage to lift the hem and take even strides at the same time.

  “Now then,” Mary said, “let us lace up your bodice.”

  Mary pulled the strings dangling at Pocahontas’s waist. The bodice constricted like a snake feasting on a mouse; it squeezed at her ribs and stomach with a vicious pressure and forced her back as upright as a spirit post. She could draw only small, shallow breaths. She grimaced and gasped. “Take it off!”

  Mary loosed the strings at once, and the panels of the bodice fell away. Pocahontas staggered to her little three-legged stool, where she sat holding her sides with trembling palms, feeling tender and bruised.

  When she had recovered, Pocahontas consented only to wearing a shift, an accommodation to the absurd English fear of nakedness that she felt was quite generous. But Mary covered her mouth, scandalized, and explained that showing the entirety of one’s shift was nearly as shocking as going about nude.

  Pocahontas would give no more ground. “If you try to dress me in a bodice and sleeves, I shall tear them to pieces!”

  The shift was made of a soft, grainy cloth that Mary called linen. Strings drew the ends of the sleeves snug about her neck and wrists, but otherwise it was voluminous, white and flowing as sailcloth, even down her arms. It was warmer than the bare skin she was used to, but not as stifling in the summer heat as a full dress and sleeves would have been.

  And best of all, it worked. Men still stared at her, but their hungry leers vanished. Now they looked at her with the same wide-eyed shock as women when they caught sight of her shift billowing in the wake of her confident stride. Mary said she raised a scandal, but she preferred inciting gossip to feeling a white man’s unsettling gaze fall upon her breasts and bare limbs.

  Something startled Pocahontas; she glanced about the chapel, her awareness of the hard, rough bench through the thin linen of her shift returning suddenly. Reverend Whitaker was gazing at her with that soft smile, but his brows were raised quizzically. He had asked her a question, and was now patiently awaiting an answer.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said quickly.

  “I asked how you are getting on with the widow Mary.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  “If you would be happier with another companion, I can find you . . .”

  Pocahontas shook her head and cast her eyes down to the chapel floor. The wood was so polished and smooth from so many feet that it looked like deep water in the dim light.

  “It’s only that you seem so despondent.”

  “I don’t know that word.”

  “It means sad.”

  Her spirit crumpled like a dry leaf, and she thought she might weep. But then, in one quick, hot heartbeat, anger leaped up to take the place of her sorrow. She lifted her chin and stared at the reverend with an expression more imperious and haughty than any Winganuske could ever have worn. “Why should I not be? I am a captive, and my father has abandoned me.” It was the first time she’d admitted aloud what she knew in her heart. Powhatan would not send for her. She would be left to her fate. She swallowed hard to drive away her tears. “Would you have me caper and sing?”

  The reverend made a little huff, a self-deprecatory chuckle. “Of course not. But I had hoped you might find some happiness here, some small comforts. We do not intend to harm you, Pocahontas, nor to make you sorrowful.”

  Pocahontas’s jaw clenched. She did not know who made her more sorrowful or whose harm cut deeper—the white men’s or the Real People’s. Months had passed since she had been sold for the price of a kettle, and here she still was, languishing in Jamestown while the world went on turning through its seasons, moving, breathing, living without her. Children were born in the longhouses of Tsenacomoco, but none were hers. White beads broke over clasped hands, but now that she had been gone so long from Kocoum’s hearth, her own marriage was shattered—vanished.

  She ached to spit a curse at Reverend Whitaker, to mock his endless stories of the god named God, who sent his priests to far-off lands to teach sinners the way of righteousness. Whose people sin? she longed to shout. Mine, or yours, who hold women captive and stare at their flesh? But Powhatan had sent no ambassador to bargain for her freedom, as she had once bargained for Naukaquawis. Nor had he summoned any tassantassa to his territory to discuss how Pocahontas might be freed. However she had imagined her freedom might come, she had remained in the white men’s hands.

  Powhatan had sent a simple admonishment that Lord De La Warr should treat Pocahontas gently—that, and nothing more. To her ears, her father’s message sounded like the barking of a toothless dog.

  “I will cease to be sorrowful when I am returned to my home, Reverend Whitaker.”

  His smile faded. “It may be some time before that comes to pass.”

  “So be it. I shall be miserable until then.”

  Her words seemed to take the reverend aback. A tender, wounded expression crossed his face, a naïve pain like a child who has only just learned that a wasp will sting. Then the smile returned, spreading above his neat beard slowly, with a thoughtful air.

  “Perhaps, Princess, you would like to learn something new.”

  “I would like to learn how I might return to my home.”

  He spoke on as if he had not heard her. And perhaps he had not, for his dreamy eyes gazed past her, looking into the distance for inspiration. “Some new skill, some task to take your mind from your troubles.”

  Pocahontas waited.

  “If you will permit it, we can teach you to read.”

  “Read?”

  She knew what reading was, of course. The English kept their records and stories not in the rhythm of chant or the rhyme of a song, but as little black marks in their books. They were meticulous keepers of their lore. It seemed nearly all of them recorded even the most mundane events of their days on sheaves of paper and stored them carefully in boxes. If she understood how to decipher the strange English markings . . . if she could access their words of power . . . perhaps she might find some way to win her freedom; a spell or a chant or a prayer that would unlock the vaunted mercy of the god called God. She sat forward eagerly.

  “I can see that the idea appeals to you,
” the reverend said. “Well, then, come to the chapel tomorrow at the same time. I believe I know just the teacher for you.”

  A fierce midday heat beat upon Pocahontas’s back as she leaned against the chapel door. It opened with a soft groan. The interior of the church was dim, almost cool. The air stirred as she closed the door behind her, rippling the dusty hem of her shift. She thought to hear Reverend Whitaker’s familiar welcome, and looked expectantly toward the altar below the great wooden cross. But the chapel was empty, save for a man seated in the second pew, head bent over his clasped hands. Waves of thin, dark hair brushed his shoulders. He wore a shirt of white linen with a spill of ruffled folds at the neck. The shirt was spotless and neat.

  She moved down the aisle carefully, fingers reaching for the straight wooden backs of each row of pews. Her unshod feet were silent on the cool plank floor. When she reached the second row, she gazed down it toward the man. His lips were moving in silent prayer and his eyes were shut tightly, his brow pinched in an expression of hopeless pleading.

  Pocahontas eased herself onto the bench. Six or seven people could have filled the space between her and the praying man. She waited for the man to finish beseeching his god.

  When he did, his eyes rose to her face directly, as if he had known she was there.

  She almost said, wingapoh. She stopped herself. “Good day.”

  A hat lay beside him on the pew, the same type of felt cap she had seen Chawnzmit—no, Mary had corrected her pronunciation of his name—the same type of cap she had seen John Smith crushing and twisting that long-ago day in the garden. John Smith had warned her then, told her she must stay away from white men, for they would ever after be a danger to her.