Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

  I thought, but did not say, that grandfather could hardly have expected the fine points of English property law to count for much to some three thousand people whose reputation, prior to our landing, had been ferocious. If there was pride to be taken in the matter, it could only be pride in the canniness of grandfather’s plan, and of father’s courage and tact in executing it. Father had been but nineteen years old when he came here. Perhaps his youth and gentle temper had persuaded the sonquem that there was no harm in the “Coatmen,” as they called us. And what harm could there be to them, from just a score of families, setting down cheek by jowl along a little edge of harborfront, while their own bands ranged hundreds strong across the island wheresoever they would?

  Father picked up the thread of his thought as if it were a tangled skein that he worried at. “We have been good neighbors, yes; I believe so,” he said. “And why should we not? There is no reason to be otherwise, no matter what slanders the Alden family and their faction concoct. ‘You may disturb and vex the devil, but you’ll make no Christians there’—that’s what Giles Alden said to me, when first I set out to preach at the wetus. And how wrong he is proven! For several years I drank the dust of those huts, helping in whatever practical thing I could do for them, happy to win the ears of even one or two for a few words about Christ. And now, at last, I begin to distill in their minds the pure liquor of the gospel. To take a people who were traveling apace the broadway to hell, and to be able to turn them, and set their face to God…. It is what we must strive for. They are an admirable people, in many ways, if you trouble to know them.”

  How I could have astonished him, and my brother too, even then, had I opened my mouth and ventured to say, in Wampanaontoaonk, that I had troubled to know them; that I knew them, in some particulars, better than father, who was their missionary and their minister. But as I have set down here, I had learned early the value of silence, and I did not lightly give away the state of myself. So I got up from the fire then, and made myself busy, wetting yeast and flour for a sponge to use in the next day’s bread.

  Our neighbors. As a child I did not think of them so. I suppose, like everyone, I called them salvages, pagans, barbarians, the heathen. As a young child, in fact, I barely thought of them at all. I lived with my twin brother, at our mother’s hem, in those days, and their doings did not touch ours. I have heard tell that it was more than a year before any soul among them came near to our plantation, neither to hinder nor to help. If my father had business in their settlements on grandfather’s behalf, he went out to this or that otan alone and I knew nothing of it.

  It was somewhen later—I am not sure, exactly, the date—but after the village of Great Harbor built its meeting house, that one poor despised fellow of theirs began to lurk about on the Sabbath. Of mean descent and unpromising countenance, he was an outcast among his own, deemed unfit to be a warrior and not privileged with the common right to hunt with his sonquem or share in the gatherings at which the sonquem gave generously of food and goods to his people.

  That my father ministered to this man, I knew, and thought little of it. It seemed only a common act of Christian charity such as we are commanded: Whatsoever you do to the least of them … But it was from this unpromising metal that father began to forge his Cross. Mother was fairly taken aback, one Sabbath, when father presented this man, whose name was Iacoomis, as his guest at our board. It happened that this man’s unprepossessing body housed a quick mind. He learned his letters avidly and in return, commenced to teach father Wampanaontoaonk speech, to further his mission. As father struggled with the new language, so too did I learn, as a girlchild will, confined to the hearth and the dooryard as adult business ebbs and flows around her. I learned it, I suppose, as I was learning English speech, my mind supple then and ready to receive new words. As father and Iacoomis sat, repeating a phrase over and over, often it fell into my own mouth long before father had mastery of it. As father learned, he in turn strove to teach some few useful words to my grandfather’s clerk, Peter Folger, who was wise enough to see its value in trading and negotiations. For a time, when we were still very small, Zuriel and I made a covert game of learning it, and spoke it privily, as a kind of secret tongue between the two of us. But as Zuriel grew bigger he was less about the hearth, tearing hither and yon as boychildren are permitted to do. So as he lost the words and I continued to gain them, the game withered. I have often wondered if what happened later had its roots in this: that the Indian tongue was bound up in my heart with these earliest memories of my brother, so that, on meeting with another of his same age who spoke it, these tender and dormant affections awoke within me. By the time I met Caleb, I already had a great store of common words and phrases. Since then, I have come to speak that tongue in my dreams.

  I remember once, when I was small, and had said “the salvages” in my father’s hearing, he reproved me. “Do not call them salvages. Use the name they give themselves, Wampanoag. It means Easterners.”

  Poor father. He was so very proud of his efforts with those difficult words; words so long one might think the roots had set and grown since the fall of the Babel tower. And yet father never mastered pronunciation, which is the chief grace of their tongue. Nor did he grasp the way the words built themselves, sound by sound, into particular meanings. “Easterners,” indeed. As if they speak of east or west as we do. Nothing is so plain and ordinary in that tongue. Wop, related to their word for white, carries a sense of the first milky light that brightens the horizon before the sun appears. The ending sound refers to animate beings. So, their name for themselves, properly rendered in English, is People of the First Light.

  Since I was born here, I too have come to feel that I am a person of the first light, perched at the very farthest edge of the new world, first witness to each dawn of the turning globe. I count it no strange thing that one may, in a single day, observe a sunrise out of the sea and a sunset back into it, though newcomers are quick to remark how uncommon it is. At sunset, if I am near the water—and it is hard to be very far from it here—I pause to watch the splendid disc set the brine aflame and then douse itself in its own fiery broth. As the dimmet deepens, I think of those left behind in England. They say that dawn creeps closer there even as our darkness gathers. I think of them, waking to another dawn of oppression under the boot of the reprobate king. At meeting, father read to us a poem from one of our reformed brethren there:

  We are on tiptoe in this land,

  Waiting to pass to the American Strand.

  I was used to offer a prayer for them, that God hasten their way hither, and that he grant their morning bring not fear, but a peace such as we here are come to know, under the light hand of my grandfather’s governance and the gentle ministry of my father.

  As I think of it now, I haven’t said that prayer in a while. I no longer feel at peace here.

  III

  The account of my fall must begin three years since, in that lean summer of my twelfth year. As newcomers will in a foreign place, we clung too long to the old habits and lifeways. Our barley did never seem to thrive here, yet families continued to plant it, just because they had always done so. At large expense, we had brought tegs from the mainland just a year earlier, mainly to be raised for their wool, for it was plain that we would need to make our own cloth, and linen did not answer in the foul winters here. But the promise of spring lamb at Eastertide proved very great, and so we put the ram to the ewes too early. Then we found ourselves in the grip of a stubborn winter that would not cede to milder days, no matter what the calendar might say on the matter. Though we all of us tried to keep the newborn lambs warm at the hearth, the bitter winds that howled across the salt-hay pastures, and the hard frosts that bit off the buds, carried away more than we could spare. All was common land then, and we had built no barns nor proper folds. With little store of saltmeat after so long a winter, and no promise of any fresh, fishing and daily foraging became our mainstay.

  First feast, then famine. The
n out on the flats a’clammin’. Such was the doggerel that year. Since clamming was a despised chore, Makepeace ensured that it fell to me. He was always quick to assert his rights, he who was both eldest, and, since Zuriel’s death, the only son. If that was not enough to secure his liberty from whatever task he shirked, he would plead the heavy demands of his studies, with which, as he put it, “my sister is not burdened.” This last stuck in my craw like grit, for I coveted the instruction that Makepeace found so troublesome and he well knew it.

  Father permitted me to take the mare, since the best clamming flats were off to the west. I was meant to seek out my Aunt Hannah, and go in her company. It was a rule that none might walk nor ride alone more than one mile from the edge of our settlement. But my aunt was harried to a raveling by all her other chores, and was more than happy, one mild day, when a softer air had touched my cheek and I offered to do her clamming for her. That was the first time I broke the commandment of obedience, for I did not tarry for another companion as she bade me, but rode off by a new way, alone. It is no easy thing to be forever watched, and judged, as I must be as the minister’s daughter. When I was out of sight of the settlement, I hitched my skirt and galloped, as fast as Speckle would consent to carry me, just to be free and gone and away.

  I grew to love the fair, large heaths, the tangled woods and the wide sheets of dune-sheltered water where I had the liberty of my own company. So I would strive to get away to such places every day, excepting on the Sabbath (the which we observed strictly and prayerfully, my father adhering to the letter of the commandment—a day to be kept—not an hour or two at meeting and then on to other pursuits).

  As often as I could, I would hide in my basket one of Makepeace’s Latin books, either his accidence, which he was meant to have had by heart long since, or his nomenclator, or the Sententiae Pueriles. If I could get none of these unnoticed, then I would take one of father’s texts, and hope my understanding was equal to it. Aside from the Bible and Foxe’s Martyrs, father held that it was undesirable for a young girl to be too much at her book. When my brother Zuriel was alive, he had instructed us both in reading. These were sweet hours to me, but they had come to a sudden end, the very day of Zuriel’s accident. We had been at our books for some hours, and father, pleased with our progress, offered to take us for a ride on the hay wain. It was a fair evening, and Zuriel was in high spirits, plucking hay from the bales and forcing it down my collar so that it tickled me. I was squirming and laughing merrily. Reaching behind me to fetch out an itchy stalk, I did not see Zuriel overbalance on the bale and so I could not cry out to father, whose back was turned to us, driving the cart. Before we knew that Zuriel had fallen, the rear cartwheel, made of iron, had run right across his leg and severed it to the bone. Father tried with all his strength to stanch the bleeding, all the while crying out prayers to God. I held Zuriel’s head in my hands and looked into his beloved face and called to him to stay with me, but it did no good. I watched as the light in his eyes drained out of him with his life’s blood.

  That was at harvest time. Throughout leaf fall and winter, we all did nought but mourn him. We walked through the chores that must be done, and then sat to pray, although often enough my mind was too clouded by grief and memory to do even that. It was late spring before my thoughts turned again to my lessons, and I finally felt able to ask father when they might resume. He told me then that he did not intend to instruct me further, since I already had my catechism by heart.

  But he could not stop me overhearing his lessons with Makepeace. So I listened and I learned. Over time, while my father thought I was tending the cook fire or working on the loom, I shored up my little foundations of knowledge: some Latin here, some Hebrew there, some logic and some rhetoric. It was not hard to learn these things, for although Makepeace was two years my senior, he was an indifferent scholar. Past fourteen then, he might have been well begun at the college in Cambridge, yet father had determined to keep him close, in the hope of better preparing him. I think that Zuriel’s death made father all the more determined in this, and I think my elder brother carried a great burden, knowing that all of father’s hopes for a son who would follow him in godliness and learning now rested on him alone. There were times I worried for my brother. At Harvard College, the tutor surely would not be so forbearing as our patient father. But I must own that my envy overleaped my concern most of the time. I suppose it was pride that led me into error: I began to chime in with any answers that my brother could not give.

  At first, when I gave out a Latin declension, father was amused, and laughed. But my mother, working the loom as I spun the yarn, drew a sharp breath and put a hand up to her mouth. She made no comment then, but later I understood. She had perceived what I, in my pride, had not: that father’s pleasure was of a fleeting kind—the reaction one might have if a cat were to walk about upon its hind legs. You smile at the oddity but find the gait ungainly and not especially attractive. Soon, the trick is wearisome, and later, worrisome, for a cat on hind legs is not about its duty, catching mice. In time, when the cat seems minded to perform its trick, you curse at it, and kick it.

  The more I allowed that I had learned what my older brother could not, the more it began to vex father. His mild countenance began to draw itself into a frown whenever I interrupted. For several months this was so, but I did not read the lesson he intended for me. In time, he took to sending me to outdoor tasks whenever he intended to instruct Makepeace. The second or third occasion, when I perceived this was to be the way of things, I gave him a look which must have revealed more than I intended. Mother saw, and shook her head at me in admonishment. Nevertheless I let the door fall heavily behind me on my way out. This caused father to follow me into the yard. He called me to him, and I came, expecting to be chastised. My cap was a little askew. He reached out a hand and straightened it, then he let his fingers brush my cheek tenderly.

  “Bethia, why do you strive so hard to quit the place in which God has set you?” His voice was gentle, not angry. “Your path is not your brother’s, it cannot be. Women are not made like men. You risk addling your brain by thinking on scholarly matters that need not concern you. I care only for your present health and your future happiness. It is not seemly for a wife to know more than her husband…”

  “Wife?” I was so taken aback that I interrupted without even meaning to speak. I was but recently turned twelve years old.

  “Yes, wife. It is early to speak of it, but it is what you will be, and soon enough. Daughter, you, in your proper modesty, cannot know it, but those with eyes see in you the promise of a comely womanhood. It has been spoken of.” I think I blushed russet; certainly my skin burned so hot that even the ends of my hair felt as if they were alight at my scalp. “Do not concern yourself. Nothing improper has been said, and I have answered what was necessary, that the time to think about such things is still years off. But it is your destiny to be married to a good man from our small society here, and I would do you no favor if I were to send you to your husband with a mind honed to find fault in his every argument or to better his in every particular. A husband must rule his home, Bethia, as God rules his faithful. If we lived still in England, or even on the mainland, you could have your choice of educated men. But on this island, that is not the way of it. You can read well, I know, even write a little, sufficient to keep a day book, as your mother does, for the benefit of the household. But ’tis enough. Already it sets you far apart from most others of your sex. Tend to your huswifery, or look to developing some herb lore, if you must be learning something. Improve your wits usefully and honorably in such things as belong to a woman.”

  There were tears starting in my eyes. I looked down, so that he would not notice, and scuffed at the ground with the toe of my clog. He rested a hand on my bowed head. His voice was very gentle. “Is it such a terrible thing, to contemplate a useful life such as your mother leads? Do not belittle it, Bethia. It is no small thing to be a beloved wife, to keep a godly house, to r
aise sons of your own…”

  “Sons?” I looked up at father, and the word caught in my throat. Sons like Zuriel—bright, sunny boy, cut down in childhood. Or like the babe who also would have carried that name, had he lived but an hour in this world. Or sons like Makepeace, slow of wit, stinting in affection.

  My brother had come out from the house. He stood behind father, his brows drawn and his arms folded across his chest. Despite his frown, I sensed he was taking a vast pleasure in observing father reduce me.

  Father, for his part, looked suddenly weary. “Yes. Sons. And daughters, too, as you know full well I meant. Be content, I beg you. If you must read something, read your Bible. I commend to you especially Proverbs 31: verses 10 to 31….”

  “You mean Eshet chayil?” I had learned the passage because father recited it for mother, for whom it might well have been written, she truly being a woman of valor, her long days consumed with just such unsung tasks as the lines described. Father would look into her face and chant the Hebrew, and its hard consonants brought to my mind the beating of a hot sun on the dry stone walls of David’s city. Then he would say the words to her in English.

  Two sins, pride and anger, overmastered me then. I could not govern myself, but spoke out petulantly. “Shall you have it in Hebrew? Eshet chayil mi yimtza v’rachok…”

  Father’s eyes widened as I spoke, and his lips thinned. But Makepeace erupted, loud and angry. “Enough! Pride is a sin, sister. Beware of it. Remember that a bird, too, can imitate sounds. You can recite: what of it? For at one and the same time, you reveal that you know nothing of the lessons of the very text you parrot. Your own noise is drowning out the voice of God. Quiet your mind. Open your heart. Do this. You will soon see your error.”

  He turned on his heel and went back into the house. Father followed him. They were both of them angry that day, but not so angry as I. I was so eaten with it that I broke the handle on the churn from thumping it so hard. I still have the scar on my palm where the splintering wood tore my flesh. Mother bound up my hand and salved it. When I looked into her kind, tired eyes I felt ashamed. I would not, for all the world, have her think that I belittled her, in thought or word. As if she knew my mind, she smiled at me, and held my bound hand to her lips. “God does all things for a reason, Bethia. If he gave you a quick mind, be sure of it, he wants you to use it. It is your task to discern how to use it for his glory.” She did not have to add the words: “and not merely for your own.” I heard them in my heart.