Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

  “Friends, hearken to me,” he began. “When we have met here before, we have agreed two truths: That God is, and that he will reward all those who diligently seek him. That the one God is the source of all manit. My friend Iacoomis has shown his heart to you, how it stands towards God, and you have seen how, when he cast off all other false worships, so he has prospered, and gained in health, he and all his family. You have asked what will happen to you when you die, and today I will answer you. Englishmen, and you and all the world, when they die, their souls go not to the southwest, as you have been taught. All that know the one God, who love and fear him, they go up to heaven. They ever live in joy. In God’s own house. They that know not God, who love and fear him not—liars, thieves, idle persons, murderers, they who lie with other’s wives or husbands, oppressors or the cruel, these go to hell, to the very deep. There they shall ever lament.”

  Beside me, two men started muttering together, thinking that I could not understand them.

  “Why should we believe our English friend, when our own fathers told us that our souls go to the southwest, to the lands of Kiehtan?”

  “Well, but did you ever see a soul go to the southwest? I have not.”

  “No, and when did he, yonder, see one go up to heaven or down to hell?”

  “He says he has it from the book, which God himself has written.”

  “What he says may be true for English, but why should I want to go to this God’s house if only English are there? If God wanted us in this house then he would have sent our ancestors such a book.”

  Listening to this exchange, I realized my difficulties were no different in kind to my father’s, and that I should just have to persevere, and trust that in time God would give me the words that would turn Caleb’s heart to him.

  About midway through my father’s sermon, I noticed that the people seemed restless of a sudden, their eyes glancing from father and over to the place where the clearing ended in dense oak woodland. I followed their gaze, squinting in the sunlight. Soon enough, I saw what they saw: A man, very tall, his face painted and his body decked in a great cloak of turkey feathers. He stood stock still, his arm raised, and in his hand some kind of mannekin or poppet, I couldn’t clearly see. Then, from the trees beside him, another appeared. A youth, also painted garishly.

  Some of the crowd started to edge away from father. The man who had remarked about Kiehtan elbowed his companion. I heard him say the name Tequamuck. I flinched, recognizing the name: Caleb’s uncle. I squinted even harder, to discern the features of the wizard and his apprentice. But their faces were so fully painted over I could not tell if what I feared was true or not. Their presence clearly agitated the crowd. Father had long held that the pawaaws were the strongest cord that bound the Indians to their own way, and that breaking their spiritual power mattered far more than interfering with the ways and privileges of the sonquems.

  The man who spoke Tequamuck’s name was the first to leave. Soon, five or six more followed. They headed towards the woods, greeting Tequamuck with great deference. When I looked again, all of them were gone.

  VII

  I never did ask Caleb if he was the painted youth at the right hand of the pawaaw. I did not want to hear his answer.

  As that ripe summer turned to autumn, the sunlight cooled to a slantwise gleam, bronzing the beach grass and setting the beetlebung trees afire. Caleb learned his letters faster than I could credit. Before the singing of the cider, he could read and speak a serviceable kind of English. I think that because he had learned from childhood to mimic the chirps of birds in order to lure waterfowl, his ear was uncommonly attuned to pitch and tone. Once he learned a word, he soon spoke it without accent, exactly as an Englishman would. In a short while, he would not have me speak Wampanaontoaonk to him except to explicate something he could not grasp, and before long we had switched from communicating with each other only in his language, to conversing most times in mine. But as much progress as we made in that direction, in the matter of his soul he resisted and mocked me, using wit that seemed to me devil-inspired. One day, when we had been discussing Genesis, he turned to me with a gleam in his brown eyes. “So you say that all was created in six days?”

  Yes, I said.

  “All?” he repeated.

  So the Bible instructed us, I said.

  “Heaven and hell, also, were created then?”

  So it says, and so we must believe. The look on his face was the very same as when he had speared a fine bass. “Then answer me this: why did God make a hell before Adam and Eve had sinned?”

  This had never occurred to me to question, but I thought quickly, and replied to him. “Because God knows all, and he knew that they would.”

  “Then why did he not scotch the snake before it tempted them?”

  “Because he had endowed them with free will,” I said.

  “And so do we endow our children with free will, yet you English chide us, and say they are unruly and should be flogged.”

  Oftentimes, these exchanges vexed me, and I broke off and rode home struggling for self-mastery and resolving to have no further relations with this hard-headed pagan. Yet within a sennight, I would seek him out again, lingering in the places which by now were familiar haunts to both of us until he sprang up in his sudden way, materializing in the tall grasses or beech groves. And so it went on, as another year turned. We each of us grew and changed, gaining new responsibilities in our separate worlds, but always making a space where those worlds could collide and intertwine. As time passed it became harder for me to keep a bright line between my English self and that girl in the woods, whose mouth could utter the true name of every island creature, whose feet could walk trackless through leaf bed, whose hands could pull a fish from a weir in a swift blur of motion and whose soul could glimpse a world animated by another kind of godliness.

  I had to work ever harder to put that girl from me when I rode back into Great Harbor. I had to learn to leave her behind in the woods; her loose limbed stride, her bold gaze and her easy manners. Lucky for me that I was so long used to considering every word before I spoke it, or I might have given myself away any number of times. Sometimes, when I came inside, mother would look up from her doughtrough or her spindle and, after admiring whatever I had plucked or gathered for the larder, would ask me what I had seen, abroad in the wide world for such hours.

  I would share with her some small piece of news, such as a sighting of an otter in an unaccustomed pond, or an uncommon kind of seal I had interrupted, basking on the beach. She would nod, and smile, and pass some remark that fresh air was healthful, and she was glad I could go about so, since she as a girl had lived a town life that did not afford such rambles. One day, she reached a floury hand and touched my face, tucking in an errant hair that had come loose from my cap. Her blue eyes—much bluer than mine—regarded me gravely. “It is a good thing—for a girl,” she said. “It will not be so, when you are become a young woman.” She went back to her kneading then, and I set a kettle to boil the lobsters and we did not speak of it again.

  It did not seem pressing then, this truth that my mother had voiced, that one day I would have to leave my other self behind forever: that it could not go on, this crossing out of one world and into another, that something was bound to happen to put an end to all of it. If I had thought clearly, and considered, and prepared my mind for it, I could not possibly have fallen so easily into the sin that brought God to smite us such a terrible blow. Looking back, it is hard to imagine how I could have been such a fool.

  It was leaf fall, the third year of my friendship with Caleb. I had gone to the upland woods where huckleberries ripened late. He appeared, as usual, suddenly and unexpectedly from the shadow of a granite boulder. He had with him the catechism I had given him so long ago. He pressed it back into my hands. “After today, I will not walk with you anymore. Do not look for me,” he said.

  This sudden pronouncement stung me like a switch. Tears welled in my eyes.
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br />   “Why do you cry?” he demanded curtly.

  “I do not cry,” I lied. His people consider tears a sign of lappity character.

  He took my chin in his hand and tilted my face upward. His fingers were rough as tar paper. He had grown in the two and a half years that I had known him, and was a full head and shoulders taller than I. A big tear spilled down my cheek and on to the back of his hand. He let go of my face and brought his hand to his mouth, tasting the salt upon it and considering me gravely. I looked away, ashamed.

  “This is no matter for tears,” he said. “It is my time to become a man.”

  “Why should that mean you cannot walk with me?”

  “I cannot walk with you because from tomorrow my steps will choose me, not I my steps. Tomorrow will be new hunter moon. Tequamuck will take me to the deep woods, far from this place. There I will pass the long nights moon, the snow moon and the hunger moon alone.” His task was to survive and endure through the harsh winter months, winnowing his soul until it could cross to the spirit world. There, he would undertake the search for his guide, a god embodied in some kind of beast or bird, who would protect him throughout his life. His spirit guide would enlighten his mind and guide his steps in myriad ways, until the end of his life. In those cold woods, he would learn his destiny. He said that if the spirit guide came to him in the form of a snake, then he would gain his heart’s desire, and become pawaaw.

  I thought of the quarantine of Jesus, a similar harsh and lonely trial of character and purpose. But that vigil passed in searing desert, not snowy wood. And when, at the end, the devil came with his visions of cities and offers of power, Jesus shunned him. Caleb desired to bid him welcome.

  And have no fellowship with the unfruitful ways of darkness. So said the scripture. I had no choice. This marked the end of our friendship. I had to take leave of him. But before I did, I looked down at the catechism he had returned to me. No matter that he lived in a bark hut, his hands ever soiled from bloody hunts and greasy common pots, he somehow had kept the book in the exact condition I had given it him. I pressed it back into those rough hands. “Do not close your heart to Christ, Caleb,” I whispered. “Perhaps he is the one awaiting you out there in the dark.”

  I turned away then because I knew I was about to cry in earnest, and I would not have him see me so. I mounted Speckle and threaded a careful way through the trees, but the world was a blur. I felt sick at heart. I told myself it was wounded pride, merely. I had falsely hoped to turn him from the path he was born to follow, and had failed. I told myself it was natural to regret that this pagan ceremony, whatever its nature, would set him at even greater remove from the gospel.

  But this, also: I burned to know what he would know when he entered that spirit world. I recalled, too well, the alien power I had felt that long ago day and night on the cliffs. I have said that I would write only the truth here, and the truth is this: I, Bethia Mayfield, envied this salvage his idolatrous adventure.

  That night, as I sat with mother at our mending, I had to use every shred of my will to keep my hands at their task. Generally, I could mend or needlepoint or embroider without the least difficulty, my fingers finding their own way over the cloth. But that night the task seemed so friggling to me that I had to concentrate on every stitch. I noticed mother glance at me from time to time as I sighed and fidgeted and tried to hide my cackhanded work. Somehow, she always sensed when something was amiss with me.

  Finally, I did something most unlike myself. I asked father a question.

  “Does it trouble you, father, that the people of this place are so slow to embrace the gospel?”

  Father put aside his bible. “I do not see it so, Bethia. We must not be willful in this matter, but patient, as God is. Did he not abandon these people to Satan all these many ages past? We must not want a convert more than God wants him. It must not be that we, in our pride, attempt to make a convert of one who is not among the elect. We are instruments, but if there is not an influence from God, the work will not be done, nor should it be.”

  “But what of the satanic rites that they persist in? Is there no way to disrupt them?”

  Father looked grave. “It is my chiefest concern,” he said. “The devil drives on their worship so pleasantly—as he does many false worships. The gift-giving at gatherings, the feasting and the dancing—these ceremonies are, I must own it, much beloved of the people. They do not like to hear me preach against these things.”

  “I was thinking particularly of the trial by ordeal that I have heard their youth are subject to … surely those rites are not so pleasant?”

  “Who has told you of such things?” he said sharply. I made my face a blank mask of indifference, as though it was a small matter, and shrugged. I felt mother’s eyes on me. “I do not rightly know. It is just something I overheard.”

  Makepeace interjected, looking up over his book. “They force the strongest and ablest of their male children to swill down poison—the white hellebore is one plant they use—and when they cast it up, they must drink it down again, and again, until what they cast is merely blood. Then, when they can barely stand, they are beaten with sticks, and thrust out into the icy night to run naked through cat briar till the devil catches them and makes covenant with them in their fainting fit.”

  “But why do they subject their youth to this? Surely there is danger in drinking such poison?”

  “Oh, they know how to decoct so as to bring on the visions they seek to have, short of a killing dose. They do it to get power, sister. Diabolic power. Some of them learn thus to call on the force of Satan to summon the fogs and whip up the seas.”

  I felt the hot blood creeping up my neck. Mother placed her hand protectively on the arc of her belly. Although it had not been spoken of, we all of us knew her condition. “Enough!” she interjected. “This is not fit talk for a Christian hearth. I beg you, hold your peace.” She feared to miscarry, as she had, just a year since, on a terrible afternoon of blood-soaked rags, whispers, groans, and then silence, for the lost babe, if mourned by mother, was never spoken of. Worse, perhaps, she feared that such talk of Satan might embolden that emissary of darkness to enter her womb and make a monstrous birth of that which grew there. I repented my question, and pressed no more. Although Solace was born unblemished five months later, there is no doubt: that ill-judged conversation and all that followed from it caused my mother’s blighted childbed, and her death.

  But I did not see that danger then. My mind was brimming with corrupt fancies. That night, I lay upon my shakedown, and though it was a night crisped by the chill of early fall, I tossed in my own heat, consumed by what Makepeace had said. I thought of that familiar chestnut-brown body, pared by ordeal, naked in the darkness. And of Satan, in his serpent form, twining about those bruised thighs, hissing out his tempting promises of potency.

  VIII

  Who are we, really? Are our souls shaped, our fates written in full by God, before we draw our first breath? Do we make ourselves, by the choices we our selves make? Or are we clay merely, that is molded and pushed into the shape that our betters propose for us?

  In the days following Caleb’s leavetaking, I turned fifteen, and my narrow world became ever more straitened. I began to feel more and more like clay, squeezed flat under the boots of other people. I went to meeting on the Lord’s Day, raised my eyes and hands to God, joined in the hymns and let the words of scripture pour into my ears. But my mind was elsewhere. What choice had I ever made that was fully my own? From birth, others had ordained my life’s every detail. That I should be a colonist and an islander, a dweller on these wild shores, all this was the product of choices my grandfather had made before I was even thought of. That I might be literate but not learned was the choice of my father; the lot of a girlchild. It was around that time that I heard father and grandfather speaking together of Noah Merry, the second son of the miller who lived south of us on the island’s swiftest brook, saying that he was a godly boy, a stout worker, an
d in time a likely husband for me. So even this choice, it seemed, would be made by others. There was a little ember of anger inside me when I thought this: a hard black coal that could be fanned into a hot flame if I chose to let my thoughts give it air. Most of the time, I did not do so. I went on, dutiful, trying to keep in mind what father preached, that all of this was God’s plan, not his, not his father’s, nor any man’s. A small part of a grand design that we could not fathom. “Consider your mother’s needlework,” he said once, taking a piece from her hands. “The design is plain to us, when we examine the front, but the back of the piece does not reveal it.” He turned it. “Here, you see the knots and the dangling threads. There is an outline of the pattern, but if we guess—is it a bird? Is it a flower? We might easily be mistaken. So it is with this life—we see the knots, we guess at the whole. But only God truly sees the beauty of his design.”

  So then, what of Caleb, or Cheeshahteaumauk, shivering out there alone, night following night? Was it part of God’s beautiful design to leave him there in the winter darkness, waiting for the devil to snatch away his soul? Or did God make no designs for the heathen? If so, what was father about, in his ministry to them? Perhaps it was pride, merely, to seek these souls that God had chosen to abandon. Perhaps it was in itself a sin…. But no. Surely my wise father could not err so. And why had God brought Caleb into my path if I was not meant to save him? Why had he set us down here at all? I could no longer even guess at the whole, no longer even glimpse an outline amid so many dangling threads.