Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

  X

  I decided that night to give my assent to grandfather’s plan, because I discerned God’s hand in it. But I thought to keep my own council regarding this choice for reasons that were not so godly. I had Makepeace upon a pin, and I intended to let him squirm there. For three days, I took a vast amusement in the small courtesies that came my way. Of a sudden he was splitting bavins unasked or at my elbow at the well, offering to carry my water.

  Each night, I took up the Homer that father had bequeathed to me and I gave myself the luxury of a candle by which to read it. The first night, Makepeace looked askance, but then quickly arranged his features and went up to his shakedown with nowt but a civil good night.

  On the third day, I asked Makepeace if he might spare me for some hours, and though he talked around the point of what might be my purpose, when I showed that I was disinclined to give it, he did not interrogate me further. Had he pressed me, I do not know what I would have answered, for my purpose was obscure even to myself. I just knew that I wanted to be free and alone for a time, as I used to be, as I had not been in such a while, and as I could not be again once we left the island.

  I rode first to father’s cairn and sat on my accustomed mossy stone. It was shaded by an old beech, and the light, filtering through the swaying leaves, cast shadows like lacework across my folded hands. Speckle walked to the pond’s edge and set her great head down to drink. It always made me smile to watch her. Even if she had been hard ridden, she drank with a delicate restraint, her muzzle barely breaking the surface, her lips closed, sipping as daintily as a duchess. When she had her fill, she turned and cropped the grass, twitching her rump to shift the flies that lit there. I listened to the sound of her teeth ripping at the sedge, the wet champ of her jaws, the buzz of the discommoded flies in wait of a chance to resettle on her sweaty flank. The sun was warm and buttery. I tilted my face towards it. After a time, the tears ran, and the mare turned her liquid gaze on me, laying back her ears as if struggling to understand what was amiss. She left off her cropping and walked over to stand by me, as if to bring me comfort. I stood, wiped my palms over my face, passed a reassuring hand down her neck and remounted, turning her for the south shore.

  When we reached that long expanse of sand it was low tide. I walked her down to where the strand hardened and the waves broke about her hocks. She lifted her head, her nostrils widening. I took off my cap and tucked it into my bodice. I leaned close to her ear, and urged her to a gallop. The salt spray winged high on either side as we pounded down that beach. I felt the wind and the spray, the thud of her hooves, the counterpoint of the hammering surf.

  When she began, finally, to tire, I eased the reins and let her slow as she would. When she brought herself to a stop, I turned her up the beach, slid off her back, loosened her bit, and threw myself down upon the hot sand. I felt my skin tighten as the spume dried into a white crust on my hands and forearms. Speckle dropped her soft muzzle and nudged my ear. I smelled her grassy breath. She licked the side of my cheek, tasting salt. A long, glistening thread of drool detached itself and fell onto me. I sat up, laughing, and pushed her off, wiping my face with the wet hem of my skirt. She walked away a few desultory paces and stood, slack hipped, blowing great, soft snorts.

  I lay down again and closed my eyes against the glare, listening to the sound of the surf as it arced all around me, the thrumming fall of the breakers, the shush of the receding waves. Every now and then I felt my skin cool slightly as a cloud passed across the sun. From time to time a gull would voice a rich cry, high and urgent.

  I lay there for a long while, drifting, letting thoughts pass like the clouds. Then Speckle neighed softly and tossed her mane. I looked across to see what had startled her. There was a shadow on the sand. Even before I turned my head, I knew that it was Caleb.

  In that shimmering, golden light I saw the wild boy I had met here four summers past, no longer wild, nor boy. The hair was cut short and plain, the fringed deer hide leggings replaced with sensible black serge. The wampum ornaments were gone, the bare mahogany arms sheathed now in billowing linen. Yet neither was the youth who stood before me some replica of a young Englishman. He was hatless, shoeless, and without his hose, so his long calves were bare. He had no doublet, and his shirt, sweat soaked, clung to his chest.

  “I saw you ride out of the settlement. I knew you would come here—.” He was straining to contain some strong emotion. He seemed to almost vibrate with the effort.

  I scrambled to my feet. “You don’t mean to say you ran here, all the way from Great Harbor?”

  He turned an open palm as if to say, How not?

  “But why would you follow me”—I lifted a hand to indicate his undress—“in this state?”

  “I had to speak to you privily before you assent—it is true, I hope, that you have not yet assented—to this shameful plan of your grandfather’s. And there is never a moment … you come not in my way.” His effort at restraint failed him at this point, and he almost shouted. “Do not let them make a slave of you, Storm Eyes.”

  I stepped back, surprised by his sudden wrath.

  “I have no idea what you—”

  “I thought your grandfather honorable.” He turned and spat on the sand. I winced.

  “He is honorable, Caleb. You must not—”

  “‘Must not!’ I am full up to my throat with ‘must not.’ You English palisade yourselves up behind ‘must nots,’ and I commence to think it is a barren fortress in which you wall yourselves.”

  His anger sparked my own. “Is that so? Then may I ask what you are doing, taking our bread and our instruction? Laying yourself to our books as if your very breath depended upon uttering a phrase in Latin? Mouthing our prayers so piously at meeting?”

  “I do not come here to speak of myself,” he said. “I know what I am about. I am come here for you, because I see now you have no family worth the name. Your father was a good man. He would never have countenanced this. But your grandfather loves his gold more than he loves you. As for your brother…” He lifted his chin sharply, his mouth drawn into a scowl. He thumped a fist against his chest. “We make slaves of our defeated enemies whom we hate, to avenge a death or the like grave wrong. How comes he to think it right that you, a sister, should be enslaved for his profit?”

  “As if you did not work every woman in your otan to a raveling, day following day! I have seen how it is among you. You do not find hard toil dishonorable when you set your own women to do it.”

  “Shared and necessary toil is one thing. Slavery is another. If I were your brother, I would not sell you into base servitude just to buy myself a future.”

  The easy tears of that season welled. “You are my brother, Caleb. My heart tells me this more clearly than any ink mark on a document.” I reached out as if to take his hand, but some constraint stopped me in mid-gesture. “The law may say what it will, but you and I know what is true. And father—he loved you as a son. Look to Makepeace, if you do not credit what I say. You will see that he eats himself hollow with envy of the love our father bore you.”

  I watched the anger leave his face, the muscles of his jaw relaxing under the high broad bones of his cheeks. He reached for the hand I had half extended, lifted it and bent his head to it—a gentleman’s gesture: I could not think where he might have seen it done. I felt the heat of his breath, the hint of his lips, and then he let the hand go, reaching for a strand of my hair. The pins had fallen, and it hung, loose and damp, almost to my waist.

  He spoke softly, almost as if to himself: “When we first met here, my hair was longer even than this.” He fingered the strand and let it fall, raising his hand and running the palm across his own close-polled head. A thought came to him then, and he gave a sudden, dazzling smile. “It may be that your father loved me, as you say. But not until I cut my hair. He had a boiling zeal to see it gone. My ‘barbarous deformity,’ he called it.” The smile faded. “Truly, I did not know I was such a sinner until he taught me to h
ate my hair.” His face was grave now, his brow creased. “So many things I loved, I have had to learn to hate. And it all started in this place, with you, Storm Eyes.”

  He turned from me then and looked back across the dunes that hid the pond where we had first encountered each other. Then, with his easy grace, he folded his legs under him and sat down upon the sand, his back very straight, his eyes upon the horizon. Without looking at me, he beckoned—the same brisk gesture he had always used when he wanted me to follow him. So I settled myself on the sand beside him and stared out at the waves. Often, in the past, when we had looked together at a common thing, I had learned that we saw it in quite different ways. He had taught me, long ago, how to see a school of fish moving through the water deep below the surface—how a certain change of light and dark could disclose them and reveal where one must throw out a net. Because of him, the sea to me was no longer an opaque mystery, but a most useful lens.

  He lifted a fistful of sand and let it fall through his fingers. “You ask why I eat with you, learn your prayers. Why I study to hate all that I once loved. Put your ear to the sand. You will hear my reason.”

  I tilted my head, puzzled.

  “Can you not hear? Boots, boots, and more boots. The shore groans under the weight, and yet more come. They crush the life from us.”

  “But Caleb,” I said. “This land—I mean, the mainland—they say it is a vast wilderness—there is room and to spare even when we come many thousands….”

  He had scooped up another handful of sand and stared at each grain as it fell through his fingers. “You are like these. Each a trifling speck. A hundred, many hundreds—what matter? Cast them into the air. You cannot even find them when they land upon the ground. But there are more grains than you can count. There is no end to them. You will pour across this land, and we will be smothered. Your stone walls, your dead trees, the hooves of your strange beasts trampling the clam beds. My uncle sees these things, here and now. And in his trance, he sees that worse is coming. Your walls will rise everywhere until they shut us out. You will turn the land upside down with your ploughs until all the hunting grounds are gone. This, and more, my uncle sees.” Caleb slapped his hand down upon the sand, then he drew it into a fist. “And yet he refuses to see that God prospers you, and protects you, and keeps from you the sicknesses against which his powers are as nothing. So, this do I see: We must find favor with your God, or die. That, Storm Eyes, is why I came to your father.” His expression was grim. I wanted to reach for his hand, offer some comfort. But I did not. I just sat there, wordless, until he spoke again.

  “Life is better than death. I know this. Tequamuck says it is the coward’s talk. I say it is braver, sometimes, to bend.”

  He turned to me. “That is why I will go now to this Latin school, and the college after, and if your God prospers me there, I will be of use to my people, and they will live. But you. There is nothing for you in that place. Why should you go? You know full well your brother is a dullard. He will not profit from this schooling, even though you give your freedom to buy it.”

  “Caleb,” I said. “I do not go to save grandfather his precious few guineas. Neither do I go for the love of my brother, and although I will rejoice in his success, I am not so blind as to conceive that my efforts for him will in any way assure it. If I am enslaved, as you call it, it is not to any but God. I go to Cambridge for the same reason you do. Because I believe God wants it.”

  “I do not understand you, Storm Eyes.”

  “Caleb, please. Do not call me by that name. We are neither of us children who may run hither and yon, as if this isle were another Eden. If it were so, once, then those gates are closed behind us now. That life is over and done.” He looked at me, and then away. I could not tell if he was puzzled by my words or hurt by them. I softened my voice, and touched his arm lightly. “You taught me once that names might serve for a season or two, then pass away. The season of Storm Eyes has passed. It is time we both of us stopped looking behind us and set our faces to the toil ahead. I told you once, long ago, that Bethia means God’s Servant. It is what I am striving to be, Caleb; it is the right name for me now. Call me so, as befits one who is my brother.” He said nothing but kept his gaze upon the sea. I felt a strong desire to make everything plain and open between us, for as he had said, such opportunities to speak one to the other had become so very few.

  “There will be a time,” I said, “perhaps soon, when our paths will go separately onward. But for a little while yet, it seems, we will walk forward together. I, for one, can say that I am glad of it. As for understanding me, I think that you do, better than any other now alive, whatever name I go by. As I would understand you.” I plucked up my courage then, and asked what I yearned to know.

  “Caleb, will you tell me what happened to you, when you went alone into the wilderness? Did the serpent come to you, in the end?”

  His chin went up as I put the question. He did not look at me, nor did he answer. There had been a light, warm breeze, all morning, from the southwest. But while we sat in speech, the wind had turned around, and freshened. Now a sudden, sustained gust blew from the north. You could see its shadow passing across the face of the ocean, pushing up flecks of white foam. The beach grass, bending to its force, sent up a whispering, and the oaks behind the dunes answered with a low roar. Sand grains stung my face.

  “He came.” He had switched into Wampanaontoaonk. Even though the glare upon the beach was intense, his eyes had darkened, the black of the pupils swallowing the brown. “The night was cold. So clear. The stars were so bright you could count the trees by their light…. I had fasted many days…. I drank the white hellebore, and cast it up, many times…. I passed between this world and the other world. And then he came, and I took him up, into my hands, and the power flowed into me.” He had raised his hands in front of him, the palms curled to grasp the muscled, twining form as he remembered it. “I took it, Storm Ey—Bethia. I took it.” His voice had deepened, finding the resonance of his native tongue. “Pawaaw.”

  The word hung there. I thought of Tequamuck. I do not know if the wizard had the power to reach into my mind, whether my thought of him called upon some dark art that he had, or whether he, by some demonic rite, had formed up visions out of sage-scented smoke and breathed them into me across all the distance between us.

  The sky cracked open and I was in a storm, wreathed in fog. I turned away from the lacerating sheets of rain, but all at once the wind lifted and blew me off my feet, into the swirling air. Then I was falling like a plummet, deep into roiling waves. When I came to rest, on the ocean bottom, there was a great silence. Father’s body floated, an arm’s length from me. Seaweed-shrouded, bloated, tugged this way and that by unseen tides moving deep beneath the waves. I reached for him, but even as I willed myself forward, I was tugged backward, speeding through water and into air. I was in our garth, the sunlight so dazzling I could not see. I blinked, and when I opened my eyes, Caleb stood there, Solace limp in his hands. He held her up to me, but as I reached out she turned into a snake, writhing, head rearing to strike….

  I felt my gorge rise. Caleb grasped my hands then and shook me. The vision crumbled into bright shards and fell away.

  “What is it? Are you ill?” His eyes were once again their normal color, treacle brown. He stared at me, full of concern. I swallowed, and gulped the clean salt air, fighting down the sickness. I could taste the bitterness of hellebore in my mouth. I closed my eyes and drove my fists against them, hard, as if I could push the monstrous visions out of my sight. I wanted to confess to him what I had done at Takemmy, tell him what my sin had caused, warn him that this so-called power he had reached out for was a devil’s snare. But all that came out of my mouth was the one word: “Pawaaw.”

  “Remember what it means, Bethia: I taught you, long since….”

  “Healer,” I whispered.

  “Just so. That is all my intention. To use this power to heal the sicknesses that beset my people.
”

  “But Caleb, the power comes from Satan….”

  “And from whence did Satan get it? Was it not from God, who created him a great angel? So your Bible says.” The wind had eased again; the trees behind the dunes quieted to a low rustling. He had switched back to English, his voice low and weary. “I am a man, Bethia. A man must take power where he finds it. If I find it in your books, I will take it. If I find it in visions brought to me by my familiar, then I will take that, too. It is what the times demand of me.”

  “Power? Does not a lightning bolt have power? Reach for it, and become a blackened husk….” My voice cracked. I drank the cold air again in greedy gasps. Caleb’s eyes regarded me.

  “Maybe,” he said at last. “That may indeed prove to be the cost.”

  I did not have the courage to look at him. I just shook my head and tried to swallow away the bitter taste that lingered in my mouth, and the salty tang of suppressed tears. When Caleb spoke again, his voice was calm and steady.

  “Not long ago, Bethia, when your father yet lived and taught us every day, your brother was struggling, as is his wont, with the Greek. When he could not get it, he became very agitated, and at the last he turned to your father, and demanded to know why we, as would-be ministers, must needs learn these things.” I have set down before that Caleb was a natural mimic, and here he pitched his voice higher and gave it a hectoring edge, becoming, to the life, the mouthpiece of my brother. “‘What has Apollo to do with Christ? Is not the study of these pagans akin to Eve and Adam’s prideful seeking after forbidden knowledge?’”

  As Caleb spoke, I could easily imagine the scene in my mind’s eye. Despite my agitation, my lips twitched with amusement. “And what did father say?”

  “He said that of course all learning must have Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation. But since God had seen fit to give us Christ’s gospel in Greek, there was surely a sign for us in that. And then he told us the Greeks’ story, of how Prometheus stole fire from the gods. He said that fire represented the lamp of learning that had been lit by the ancient Greeks and passed to us, to keep alight. So am I a thief of fire, Bethia. And since it seems that knowledge is no respecter of boundaries, I will take it wheresoever I can. By light of day, in your schoolrooms. By candlelight, from your books. And if necessary, I will go into the dark to get it.”