Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

  My arms became slack. Some pieces of linen fell to the floor. As I bent to retrieve them, the master commenced to translate the Hebrew into English, and the full meaning of the passage fell into my heart: “Let us go into the fortified cities and perish there; for the Lord our God has doomed us to perish, and has given us poisoned water to drink, because we have sinned against the Lord. We looked for peace, but no good came, for a time of healing, but behold, terror.”

  At that, I caught another echo—of Tequamuck and his fearful prophecies. If it is indeed so, that the Indians of this place are lost Jews, perhaps such as Tequamuck are the Jeremiahs of their race. Not for the first time, my mind ran on what had happened to Caleb in those wilderness months. Was he, as Makepeace held, a vessel through which darkness yet trickled, a conduit that might carry the taint of evil into God’s own churches…?

  Of course it was not so. These morbid imaginings sprang from exhaustion, merely. Yet tears filled my eyes. They come all too easily now. They come now, again, even as I write this. It seems I could weep forever, and yet not empty the reservoir of my grief.

  V

  This night, I read over what I have set down here, and resolved to be more clear in my account going forward. I must not jump hither and yon, as I did in my writing yester eve. And this, also: I must refrain from indulging in excesses of sensibility and flights of morbid imagination. The last of the lines I wrote are smeared because I gave way to myself. Despair is a sin, and I had best not add it to my ledger. I will strive therefore, not only to maintain an exact diligence in my place, but to set out in plain words what passed that season on the island and try withal to see God’s hand in it:

  Whatever joy there might have been in the summer that followed Caleb’s coming to us, it ended on a day so sweet and still that I moved through it as if floating in a bath of honey. It had rained hard the night before; that kind of heavy, sharp-scented summer rain that lays the dust and washes the pollen from the air, leaving everything rinsed and bright. The fragrance of ripeness and bloom grew more pungent as the morning waxed fair. The harbor sparkled, and when the lightest of breezes rippled through the sea grass, each blade shimmered like a filament of beaten silver.

  On a day so Godsent, your mind is untroubled, the entire world seems well. You gird for tragedy on a different sort of day—a day of bleak gray sky, blowing mists and bitter, howling winds. You pray to avert ill fate on such a day. This I know. But on that day, my thoughts were all of fruitfulness and promise. Even when a rough-footed hen crossed my path in early morning, which all know for a token of fell tidings, I discounted the omen. It was not possible to imagine that anything should go awry on such a day.

  I went out to pick the ripened beans and squash. They were coming in so plentiful I had to take two whiskets to carry home the yield. I liked to pick at first light, if I could slide from the shakedown without wakening Solace. It was lovely to do the chore in the cool, dew-moistened field. But if she waked, as she did that morn, I had to set the task aside till after dinner, in the full heat of the day, while she napped. I would see her settled in her crib as father commenced the lessons. If she stirred before my return, Makepeace would gather her up and jostle and coo at her for the short time necessary. He never shirked or complained of this: Solace was the one being with whom he did not feel constrained in expressing his true affections. Also, as I now think, it gave him some relief during the lesson; some cover for his slowness. This is how we went on every day, and I had no reason to question the arrangement.

  Because the day was so fair, I did not hurry through the picking, as I did when heat thickened the air. I dawdled about, sampling the young filet beans, crisp and juicy, right off the stem. Then I ambled home at a leisurely pace. I sang a psalm as I walked, and barely thought to hush myself until my hand was upon the door latch. Father was reading aloud the Polyphemus episode from Homer, and you could have heard a needle drawn through cloth, so quiet were his listeners. Since there was no stirring from Solace’s crib, I conceived that she napped still. I untied my hat, flicked it playfully up onto the peg rail and busied myself in the buttery unloading the whiskets, setting out some of the tenderest beans to eat fresh, laying the fatter ones upon racks to dry and shell for winter store. I will own it: I too listened to father read the familiar tale, waiting for my pet lines, where Odysseus in his pride discloses his identity and brings on the wrath of Poseidon that will cost him and all his men so dearly. It is a stirring passage. I was struck, as always, that a heathen poet from long ago should know so much of the human heart, and how little that heart changes, though great cities fall and new dispensations sweep away the old and pagan creeds.

  I pondered this for a good while even after father left off his reading and set the boys to translation. Finally, I was minded to see to Solace. I went in, and found the crib empty. I looked under the board and in the corners and all about the room, feeling no misboding, thinking only to discover her playing quietly in some unlikely place.

  But finding her not, I interrupted father to ask where she might be.

  He looked at me, startled, and then glanced all about him in confusion.

  “She was here just now presently. She woke, and was making a fret, so I told Makepeace to set her down here, by me….”

  Caleb and Makepeace were already on their feet, followed by Joel. Makepeace did as I had already done, and searched round and about him. We all of us moved in confusion, increasingly frantic, calling her name. But Caleb went straight as an arrow to the place, covering the short way in a few long strides.

  She was facedown in the shallow hole, not yet three feet deep, that was to have been our new well. There was rainwater from the night’s shower puddled there, inches merely. Yet somehow enough to steal breath from a babe who crawled to the edge, tottered on her unsteady little feet, and tumbled in.

  Caleb snatched up her limp, muddy little body and ran back to where I stood with father in the garth. He was crying out in Wampanaontoaonk. Makepeace, coming from the house, saw, and howled like a wounded beast.

  As Caleb handed her into father’s outstretched arms, I remember the water, dripping off her hem and sluicing from her silky hair. I remember that the droplets sparkled in the sunlight, as if an angel scattered gems in the way of her ascending soul.

  VI

  It was like Zuriel’s death, lived a second time. Father had blamed himself then—I think, groundlessly—for running the wain over Zuriel, and now he blamed himself for lack of attention to Solace when she was in his care. His pain was all the greater, perhaps, because Mother was not at his side, requiring his strength to help her bear it. Indeed, the loss of the babe stripped the scab that had formed over the wound of losing mother. It had been just a little more than a year since her death, and now we found our grief for her ran fresh, feeding this new anguish.

  Makepeace, too, felt the weight of responsibility. His faith, as ever, instructed him to bear God’s will without complaint. When we wept, he prayed. But this time his body proved less mighty than his will, so that his very skin broke into canker sores and his hair commenced to fall out in small clumps.

  Joel and Caleb also mourned. Although they prayed our Christian prayers with us, I am certain that the two of them went to the woods, after her funeral, and daubed their faces with charcoal as they would for a child who died among their own kin. On the day following her burial, upon her grave I found evergreen sprigs, which surely was no English doing. I feel sure Caleb was behind this, for Joel was not raised in the heathen traditions of his people, which say that their god made man and woman from a pine tree, and even if he did know of them in a general way, I do not think he would have felt moved to perform such things unprompted. If father was aware that they had done pagan rites, he said nothing of it in my presence. But it was plain enough to me, who emptied the washtub and laundered their sleeves and collars.

  And this too I will set down: father was sitting up with Solace, the night before we buried her. I had washed her tiny body
for the last time, my tears mingling with the bathing water. I had made a simple dress for her, and trimmed it with the lace from our baptisimal gown. Mother had made it for me, and Solace had worn it on that day when, still grieving for mother, we took her to the meeting house to wet her head. While I sewed, father and Makepeace together had fashioned her tiny box, and the scent of planed pine filled the room. We had laid her in it, but had not yet found the heart to nail up the lid. So we sat in prayer until finally, as the hour drew late, father sent us all to our shakedowns. My arms were so empty, I could not sleep. In the small hours I heard a stirring in the room below, and thought that father must be restless and troubled. I threw my shawl about my shoulders and was going to descend when I saw that the person moving about was Caleb. Father, exhausted, had fallen asleep with his head upon the table. Caleb was standing by Solace. I saw him lift her tiny hand and slip something into her fingers.

  In the morning, I went privily to Caleb and asked what he had done, fearing that whatever he had put into her hand might be an un-Christian thing. He told me that it was a scrap of parchment on which he had made a fair copy of the scripture of our Lord, Suffer the little children … He had tied it up with his own wampum-beaded thong of deer hide, around the peg doll that Makepeace had fashioned for her and that had been her chief plaything in her last month among the living.

  “A medicine bundle, such as the pawaaws use?” I said, troubled.

  “No,” he replied calmly. “Not quite.”

  “But surely something very like…,” I said, wringing my hands.

  He reached out and put his hands on mine, unclenching them gently. His own hands had grown less rough in the months since he had come to us.

  “Why send her into the earth without some token of the love we all of us bear her? Your father preaches that not all the old beliefs are evil. If, as he fashions it, Kiehtan our creator god is Jehovah by another name, then why shun the customs we have that come from him, to give the departing a small gift of comfort from this world as they pass into the next? A piece of gospel scripture, a few beads, and her doll. What harm is in it?”

  I could not say. But my mind remained uneasy, weighing the matter like a scale that cannot find a balance point.

  After her burial, we embarked once more upon a time of hard soul-searching, seeking to know where each of us had failed in the eyes of God. I saw more punishment for my idolatry, the truth of which I still could not bring myself to confess. Makepeace, for his part, went to meeting and accused himself in public of an inventory of offenses, from gluttony to sloth—flaws of character of which I had been aware—but then also lust, which did surprise me, until I looked at him with something other than a sister’s eyes, and reflected that he was in truth a boy no longer. I found myself wondering if his lust had an object, and if so, who it might be. I followed his gaze after with greater attention, but did not learn anything by it. He made strenuous efforts to reform himself of the first two categories of sin, becoming quite abstemious at board and applying himself in an uncommon way to his chores. I do not know how he fared with regard to the other, and if his affections were engaged somewhere, I was not sharp-eyed enough to discern it.

  It was father whose season of reflection led to the greatest change in our condition. His conscience prompted him to conclude that he had been insufficiently zealous regarding the pawaaws and the breaking of their hold on the people. “They are the strongest cord that binds these people in darkness,” he said. “I must sever it. There is no other way.” He decided to stop waiting for converts to come in, and to take his message beyond Manitouwatootan. He began traveling to the non-Christian settlements, begging the sonquems for permission to preach. One or other, Makepeace, Joel or Caleb, was always at his side during these ventures, and from their talk at board I conceived a picture of the encounters. What I learned troubled my mind.

  Father, it seemed, had become fierce, abandoning a gentle gospel of love and forgiveness in favor of fire-and-brimstone threats, promising hell and damnation and bloody vengeance to nonbelievers.

  One day, he arrived home after preaching to the stiff-necked sonquem of Chappaquiddick. He was spattered in sand and muck and wet through from the crossing to the smaller island, and as I warmed water for his wash, I saw that he could not move his right arm, and when I asked, he told me that indeed he had been dealt a blow from the sonquem’s warclub, but that the arm, though sorely bruised, was not broken.

  “Do not concern yourself, daughter,” he said. “I have one arm for receiving injuries and another arm to lift up in praise of God. While I received wrong to one, I raised the other higher to heaven, and truly, when the sonquem saw that I did not fear him, but stood firm, he consented to listen to my words in full, and bade his pawaaw do so, which he has never countenanced heretofore.”

  Father’s preaching became ever more firey as the summer reached its height. This was so even in the staid confines of our own meeting house. He would work himself up to a pitch of passion, the sweat flying from his brow as he gesticulated wildly, declaring at the last that he would put all of the island’s pawaaws under his heel. This drew approving looks and cries of “Amen!” from the Aldens, but when I ventured a glance back toward the Iacoomis bench, the family looked pained, and, in the seat by Makepeace, Caleb’s brow was drawn.

  In mid-August, father consented to meet a challenge from the pawaaws, to confront five of them, who said they would jointly try their power against his. I overheard Joel and Caleb speaking of this, their voices low and troubled. I passed the news to Makepeace and asked him to persuade father against this venture, which I thought fraught with danger, for himself and for the gospel also. Anything might thwart him on the given day. He might be served some tainted bever or by chance develop an ague, and everyone would take it as a sign that the pawaaws had o’ermastered him.

  Makepeace took my point, I must say, most civilly, and thanked me for my counsel. I overheard as he and father talked late into the night, Makepeace urging him to caution, but to no effect. That night, it was father who could not command his tongue. I could hear him quite clearly through the blanket that divided us, his voice growing louder in his ardor: “Makepeace, you must see that if I do not go, then they will conclude that I quailed. I will not have them think that of me, or of the message of the Lord.”

  Father rose on the appointed morning and set off for the meeting place. He had told Makepeace he was not to accompany him; he wanted to face the pawaaws quite alone, so that it would be clear that he did not fear them. But Caleb and Joel went, privily, taking secret ways that Caleb knew. They returned, much excited, and in the brief moment we had alone told me that father had prevailed mightily, and this before a large crowd of Wampanoag who had gathered to witness the confrontation.

  At board, Makepeace pressed father into an accounting. Father said he had stood in a circle formed by the painted sorcerers, and for some hours all, together and severally, had tried their most malign spells, cursing and execrating, dancing and chanting, drumming and shaking their gourds. Father had only laughed, which enraged them, and never ceased to raise his voice, preaching the power of the one true God. At the end of it, he had gone untroubled on his way.

  Converts flocked to him in the weeks that followed, as news of the encounter spread from one end of the island to the other. When one of the five pawaaws fell ill with spotted fever, and then another, the remaining three came into Manitouwatootan and accepted the gospel of Christ.

  But there was one who remained beyond father’s reach: Caleb’s uncle, Tequamuck. Father did not speak ill of him before Caleb, but when I overheard him in conversation with grandfather, he fretted and railed at the reports which reached him of that pawaaw’s teachings. Tequamuck continued to put fear into the people, spreading outlandish and dreadful prophecies about the English that he claimed had come to him in visions, the gift of his familiar spirit. Tequamuck hated father’s prayers, saying they were spells crafted to lead the people away from their own gods. He
warned that once father had contrived to strip them of their protecting spirits, the English would destroy them utterly. I do not know if Tequamuck truly thought my father so malign. I do think he hated him, as one man will hate another who draws off the affections of a beloved. Tequamuck burned with a jealous rage that Caleb studied with father to serve the English God. Word came to us from time to time of terrible threats against my father’s life. But if these troubled father, he gave no sign of it.

  Instead, he set about even more diligently to win converts. He began to correspond more regularly with John Eliot, who conducted a mission on the mainland and was, as far as we had heard, the only one among the elect of the entire colony who laid himself sincerely to this sacred duty. From this correspondence, father took great heart, and conceived a desire to bring a second missionary to the island. Particularly, he talked of what more he could do if he was in purse to employ a schoolmaster for the Indian children. Yet we could offer no such salary as would invite either a trained minister or master to embrace such a troublesome employ.