Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

  The sun was low in the sky, setting the trees alight and sending their red reflections dancing across the pond like the lick of little flames. And then, all at once, the pond was on fire. The tongues of light were not reflections, but real flames, running hot across the surface of the water. Soon, they melded into great sheets of fire, leaping and roaring, taking shapes of giants whose blackened hide coruscated like gashed coals. I buried my head in my arms, but the visions forced their way behind my closed eyelids. There was a terrible noise: thunder claps and great cracking sounds as if the very earth was rending open beneath my feet. I started to pray, but the words came off my thickened tongue strangely; uncouth, guttural words whose meaning I did not know. The taste in my mouth was metallic now, warm and viscous, like clotted blood. The blood of Christ. No, not that. No sacred wine from Satan’s chalice. This was the blood of some demonic sacrifice; some gentle innocent impaled upon the devil’s trident, bled to desiccation. My head was about to split, so severe was the pain that wracked me.

  If there was power here, it was not for me. This was forbidden fruit indeed. I did not think I could rise up off my knees, but without willing it I was on my feet and running fast as a wood sprite, leaping bushes and evading snags with an agility I had not known I possessed. I ran and leapt until my gut seized and I fell on my knees grasping at my belly. I hoped to cast up the potion and be rid of it. But instead my heaves were dry. I was wracked by cramp. I felt my belly as a spasm girded it. Something was moving there, a hard orb pushing against my soft insides. I reached down. Wet, slimy. Horned head, cloven hoof. The devil’s spawn, heaving up out of my rending flesh. It thrust its way out of me, a bloodied claw gripping my shredded muscle, tugging up through glossy, throbbing entrails. Leathery pinions, dripping ordure. They flexed and extended, brushing my face. I flailed at the beast with both arms. The unholy creature beat its wings, emitting the stench of corruption and rot—the scent of death, not birth. It rose into the riven sky from which bright white arrows fell down upon me, setting me all aflame. I watched my burning flesh blister and melt, falling away from charred bone, until my eyes, withered in the heat, dropped from their sockets like dried pease. Then I saw no more.

  I came back to myself lying upon the grass beside the pond. Only minutes had passed, for the sun was just fallen behind the hillock to the west of the pond. The afterglow, pink and lilac, bathed everything in a benign light. I looked at my arms, whole and healthy, and felt my belly, which was tender but most certainly not riven. There was a stench, to be sure. My cast, steaming slightly on the grass, accounted for part of it. I reached for a handful of sassafras leaves to wipe my mouth. As I rose I felt a wetness, and realized with humiliation that I had soiled my drawers. I drew them off in disgust, wrapped them around a rock and threw them far into the trees. My hands shook. I knelt down, took a deep, ragged, sobbing breath and prayed to God for forgiveness. But I did not expect his mercy.

  Once, when grandfather did not think I overheard, he related to father a most terrible case that had come before the mainland magistrates. A woman had thrown her own babe down a well. When she was brought to answer for the murder, she said that one great good had come of her evil act. At last, she said, she was free of the uncertainty that had plagued her every waking thought: was she numbered among the damned or the saved? Her whole life had been bent about that question. Finally, she knew.

  I thought of her, as I stumbled back to the wetus to wait for father. Now I too, seeker after strange gods, had an answer. Remarkably, rather than oppressing me, this thought made me feel oddly light, as I suppose does the reaching of any kind of certainty, no matter how bleak. I did not know then that God would not wait unto the afterlife, but move so swiftly in this world to punish my sin.

  X

  For over an hour, I waited while father attended upon Nahnoso. Spasms wracked my gut and my head throbbed. Pretending I was working for father, I steeped some willow bark and drank the liquid, hoping to ease my head. But it was shame that sickened me and no decoction could cure that. Finally, father sent word to me to prepare some onions for a chest poultice, and when he emerged from the wetu I asked if he thought the willow tea might lessen the fever.

  “Apparently they have done this already, along with some other witch medicine prescribed by that man,” he inclined his head to where Tequamuck lay, his eyes closed now, a skin cloak thrown over him, his breathing the regular breath of one deep asleep. I realized, with alarm, that I had not returned the gourd to his side, but left it in the thicket. It could not be helped; I could not fetch it now. Father was speaking to me, so I struggled to attend to him. “I propose to bleed him. You may hold the basin if you feel you can.”

  I followed father into the wetu where the sick sonquem lay, his son at his side, surrounded by the most notable men of the village. “What do you have for a lancet?” father asked. One of the men turned over his hand and showed an arrowhead. Father took it up. The man’s arm, where father thought to open the vein, was greasy with streaks of raccoon grease and carbon black, so I washed it, to better reveal the vein, and rubbed the place with crushed mint. Father pressed the stone point into the flesh. I held the basin in my trembling hands, and tried to give myself up to the prayers that father was offering. When father believed we had let sufficient blood, I pushed healing comfrey leaves upon the wound and bound them up with a leather thong that someone passed to me.

  While the onions roasted, I smashed the mustard seed into a paste to add heat to the poultice. I could hear the rattle in Nahnoso’s chest as father strapped it on. Time crawled, marked by the rise and fall of that ragged breathing. By and by, I thought that the man’s color began to change. It was dark in the wetu, so I thought perhaps my eyes tricked me. But in a while there could be no mistaking it, his labored breathing eased. An hour passed, and then, miracle! He opened his eyes and looked about, asking where he was and, in some agitation, who we were. His son Nanaakomin gave a great cry of joy and embraced his father. It startled me when he cried out, so like was his voice to Caleb’s.

  The Takemmy sonquem spoke up then, and told him the whole of it, from the time he had fallen ill: of their own pawaaw’s failure to turn back the sickness, and of sending for Tequamuck and that man’s day-long, fruitless efforts. Then he pointed to my father and described how heat magic (the poultice) and blood magic, partnered with spells addressed to the English God, had returned him from the brink of death.

  “Manitoo!” breathed Nahnoso, and fell back on his mat. Father turned to me then and spoke in English. “I would like to stay and see to his care, but I do not want you to pass the night here.”

  “Why not, father?”

  “Because there is no wetu in which you might lay your head without risk of witnessing some indecency. I will ask Momonequem to return us to the Merrys and then I will come back here with him.”

  “You need not escort me, father. I am quite prepared to go with Momonequem.”

  “By no means. Even if the youth is honorable, which I have no reason to doubt, I would not put your reputation at risk. What would the Merrys make of such a thing? You, alone in a boat with … no, it is unthinkable.”

  I thought of all the hours I had spent alone with Caleb. Innocent hours that would make a harlot of me in my father’s reckoning, and in the eyes of our society. It was well that no one knew of them.

  We rowed back to the Merry farm by rushlight. Jacob Merry insisted on ceding his place to me, so I lay down with Sofia as my bedfellow. Her featherbed was twice as wide and lofty as my straw-and-rag-filled shakedown. Though I fell straight to sleep I was awakened many times by fell dreams. I had to resort to the necessary several times throughout the night. When Sofia asked what ailed me, I blamed my bowels’ distress on the corn mash I had taken from the common pot in the wetu.

  In the morning I rose, weary, and gave a hand to Sofia with her chores until the men came in for bever. I felt Jacob Merry’s eyes upon me as I helped Sofia serve out cider and slices of crusty bread spread
thick with new-churned butter. I tried to hide the tremor in my hands.

  “Noah, as Mistress Mayfield is detained here for some hours, perhaps she would like to see the farm. Why do you not show it her?”

  “I will, father,” said Josiah brightly.

  “Not you, Josiah, I can’t spare you. I want your help at the mill.”

  “But we already ground…”

  Jacob Merry pushed his chair back noisily and glared at his eldest son.

  “I am in want of your help.”

  “Very well, father.” As Josiah rose obediently from his seat, I saw him wink at his brother and punch him lightly on the arm. Noah flushed.

  Whatever consciousness he might have felt, he quickly shook it off as we walked the fields. I tried to attend to him, but my mind was still occupied with the prior day’s madness and my thoughts were as scattered as blown chaff. Noah’s zeal for farming was patent. If only I shared it, how much simpler my life would be. I let his remarks about the forage virtues of timothy and vetch flow over me, exclaimed where it seemed required at the remarkable number of twins the ewes had produced at last lambing and nodded sagely as he outlined his plans for orchards, a creamery and all manner of improvements. “Josiah’s interests are with the mill, and developing that enterprise will be his main pursuit. My concern is the farm. In time, father and I hope to have the means to expand, if the sonquem will sell more land to us. There are fertile bottoms in yonder woods that would yield easily to the hoe. It does seem strange to leave them a wasteland…”

  As he prattled, my mind was on Nahnoso. I wondered how he fared, since father’s fate was now bound with his. But suddenly Noah stopped his prating and turned to me with an avid look. “It seemed yesterday that you understood the speech of the Indians at our board. Is it so, indeed?”

  “Well, I—” I gazed into Noah’s open countenance. His pale blue eyes looked back at me with curiosity. Was this youth really destined to be my spouse? I felt next akin to nothing in my heart that said it should be so. But if it were to be, I must not lie to him now. What manner of marriage could be built upon a foundation of untruth? The falsehood that was forming on my lips, I swallowed. “Yes,” I said. “Though it is a most difficult tongue.”

  “I know it! I cannot retain above two or three words of it—I was never one for rote learning. Father does better, but ’tis a struggle for him also. How marvelous that you can converse with them! It would be a great thing for us if someone from our household could have easy speech with them—we could do much if we understood each other better.”

  Now it was my turn to color. Did he mean to say he already counted me a potential member of his household? Or did I, knowing what I should not, feel too conscious of an innocent observation? Either he was too forward, or I was too fretful. But if father had not given me a full accounting of the understanding regarding myself and the Merrys … At that thought, I felt the ember of anger flare suddenly and burn white hot.

  “Shall we turn?” I said. “I am ready to go in.”

  As we walked back to the house, I kept my eyes on the ground so as not to notice the low autumn sun spangling across that extravagance of glass.

  Father returned at noon time, and we set out for home soon after, in order to reach Great Harbor before dark. Although father tried to project a sober mien, I could tell he was fairly bursting with joy. Nahnoso had made a remarkable recovery, and seeing in it a sign of the English God’s power, had asked to be instructed in the ways of the one true God and his son, Jesus Christ. “To convert a sonquem, Bethia … this will be a turning point for the mission, I know it. And such a sonquem, related so closely to that wizard, Tequamuck … to defeat such as he … if we can but break his hold on the people … Christ has had a great victory here, daughter. A great victory. Nahnoso has agreed to receive Iacoomis and to take instruction from him in the gospel. When he is well, he will bring his family to hear me preach at Sunday meeting in Manitouwatootan.”

  His family. Surely that must include Caleb, his son. What would his father’s change of heart mean for him? Would his father order a stop to his heathen quest? As fallen as I felt, and heavy in my own sin-stained soul, I prayed to God to keep Satan from Caleb until his father could fetch him back out of the wilderness.

  As for my family, we returned home that night to an evening of uncommon rejoicing. Father was full of his triumph, and I had never seen mother more radiant than she was that night, hanging upon his words. Her condition was patent by then, and it had put an uncommon bloom upon her. I overheard her confide to Goody Branch, not long after, that she had never carried easier than she did with that babe, who would become our Solace, and her mortal bane. Perhaps the joy she found in those last months was a mote of God’s mercy, gifted to her, even as he shaped within her the instrument of his retribution unto me.

  XI

  The hour is late. It is gone past midnight, so already the Lord’s Day is upon us. Once again I sin, breaking the Sabbath by sitting up to scrawl these words. On the morrow, at this hour, Caleb will be asleep in the room below.

  I am bone weary, having risen early these past days and stayed too long awake to write these pages. I have not yet set down all I purposed, though I have given here the better part of it, which is the account of my own sins. My eyes are heavy, so I will add but a brief account of how we are come to the present circumstance.

  I witnessed none of what follows, but rather had to prise every fact from father’s talk with others when he thought he was not overheard. The short of it: father did not get his sonquem convert, nor did he break the power of the pawaaw Tequamuck.

  When Iacoomis traveled out to preach the gospel to Nahnoso, as had been arranged, he was met by Tequamuck in full sorcerer’s regalia. A kind of duel took place between them, Tequamuck pitting his spells and demonic familiars against Iacoomis’s sacred prayers. Iacoomis stood firm, proclaiming that his God was greater than all of Tequamuck’s familiar spirits. Neither man yielded. In the end, Nahnoso stood with his kinsman, and declined to hear Iacoomis that day, or any other. Whether Tequamuck worked upon Nahnoso’s reason or simply bewitched him, as father believed, I cannot say. Father, much distressed by Iacoomis’s account, rode out himself to see Nahnoso. He brought the sonquem a stern message, warning that God would not be slighted; that, having once resolved to accept the truth of the gospel, to turn back to the devil had become a far graver sin. But Nahnoso, returned to full vigor, would have none of it and told father to trouble his mind no further. He argued fiercely, in words given him by Tequamuck: “You come here to disturb my rest with your tales of hell and damnation, but your tales are hollow threats, meant to scare us out of our customs and make us stand in awe of you. I will not hear your words.” He ordered father and Iacoomis banished from the Nobnocket lands.

  Not even a month later, Nahnoso sickened again, this time with the greatest of all their scourges, the small pox. A sorer disease cannot befall them and their fear of it is very great. They that have this disease have it to a terrible extent—much worse even than we. For them, there is not the scattering of pox such as we are accustomed to suffer, but a vast clustering of pustules, breaking their skin and mattering all together.

  When father first heard this report he was much grieved and made to go there, but Tequamuck persisted in refusing him to pass. We had little news of how the people fared, for the Wampanoag of Manitouwatootan were filled with dread and would not go there, not even those with family ties, no matter how father appealed to them to show Christian mercy. A sennight passed before one brave soul ventured there, and returned with a fearful report. Nahnoso had died; further, of a band numbering some hundreds, less than three score souls remained alive, and most of those were sore afflicted.

  This news was too much for father. “If so many are dead there will be few to tend those that yet live,” he said. He and grandfather enlisted some other good men from Great Harbor—they refused me and Makepeace, saying that elders seemed better able to withstand this disease than
the young—and set out with supplies. This, even though mother neared her time. But she urged father to go, saying that she had no fears for the outcome of her confinement, but great fears for his mission to the Indians, should he forsake them in such an hour of need. The party was away several days and we feared for them. But then one among them—James Tilman—returned to gather more supplies and to bring word that father was engaged in a great struggle to save as many who yet lived as God’s providence would allow.

  Master Tilman was all grave looks as he asked mother to fetch what could be spared from our stores of food. When I went out with her to the buttery, we both of us overheard as he described the lamentable condition of the people to Makepeace. I could not meet mother’s eyes as the words drifted through the partition, but our hands, reached out to each other and clutched tight.

  “One poor man, I thought to help him as he lay in his dreadful discomfort, so I attempted to lift him…” Tilman’s voice quavered and fell so low we could barely hear him. “I did not see that his poor broken skin had cleaved to the mat he lay upon, and a whole side of him flayed off as I turned him. He was all blood and gore, most terrible to look upon…” He broke off, and I heard heavy breaths as he strove to contain himself. Mother left me then and went in to warm a posset. She pressed him to drink it. As much as I felt for the general suffering, my mind was filled with thoughts of Caleb. I had wished him plucked from his quest in the woods. Now I prayed hard that he was out there still and not lying with his kinfolk, bloody and dying.

  “’Tis well your husband pressed us to go there,” Tilman said to mother, when at last he recovered himself. “They have fallen down so generally of this disease that for some days they had not been able to help one another. They were without firewood and had burned their wood vessels—their mortars, their bowls, even their arrows in their extremity. Nanaakomin, the sonquem’s son, was one who had done this, before the disease claimed him. Later, I came upon his mother, the sonquem’s own squa, fallen dead by the wayside…. She and her babes had suffered so from thirst and none to bring water that she tried to crawl on all fours to the spring. I buried her, of course, and two of her babes with her. Your good husband has us bury them after their own fashion, tied up in deerskins. Those who survive thank him for this kindness and kiss his hands.”