Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

  I turned back into the kitchen, to assess the place that was my more immediate concern. A single large kettle and small selection of pans hung above the pot well. There were eating utensils on the dresser—pots of chipped slipware and three good pewter tankards which, upon examination, proved to have pupils’ initials scratched crudely on the base. Likewise the trenchers were of worn wood, except for three pewter plates, also etched with initials. So there were some better off pupils, who had brought their own things—Makepeace would be mortified when he learned of this, as I knew he had not thought to pack anything of that nature.

  I soon enough learned the names of the “pewter platers,” as that trio tended to give the most trouble and make most demands upon my time. One set of initials, JD, belonged to Joseph Dudley, the former governor’s son and the most difficult. He was one of the elder scholars, who would also attempt the matriculation examination. He was a well-favored youth with an unlovely manner, haughty and cocksure. During my first days at the school he treated me in a most peremptory way. While the other boys folded their soiled linens and set them on their pallets for me to collect on washday, he dropped his upon the floor. At board, when the other boys carried their dishes to the trough after meals, he rose from the table and left his as they lay.

  The second week, when he once again left his linens scattered, I did not trouble to pick them up. It was a fine day, and I was able to get all dry and the collars pressed by sunset. Most of the boys returned to the attic to find their clothes folded neatly on their beds. Dudley found his as he had left them, and commenced to curse the “slattern” that Master Corlett had employed. I would like to say that it was Makepeace who leapt to my defense, but I learned later, from Joel, that it was Caleb. Makepeace, ardent to curry favor with the highest born of his fellows, had been ashamed to speak for me. But Caleb stepped up to the young man and enlightened him, in strong terms, as to my family’s position, and said that he would take personally any further insults upon me or my work. Dudley was a well-built young man, and I am sure he knew how to use his fists. But he was also an intelligent boy and no hothead, and could readily calculate that in a bout with Caleb he might not show to advantage.

  I knew nothing of this exchange the next day, when young Dudley came to me in the kitchen and begged my pardon, saying he had been uninformed as to my connections and had taken me for a common servant, and now he repented his incivility to me.

  “I thank you for that, young master,” I said, rather coolly. “You study here in hope of taking orders, I understand?”

  He nodded his fair head. “I do, if I am equal to that high calling.”

  “Then I hope you will not take it amiss if I, as you now know, the daughter of a minister, recommend to you some verses: Matthew, 21:26–28. You will note that Jesus does not enquire as to connections before he extends civility to those of a servile condition.”

  I turned then and went back to my scrubbing. The next thing I knew, he was beside me, clout in hand, rubbing at the deal with great energy, his fine skin tinted a mottled pink.

  “I think you have not done this work before?” The pink of his cheeks became a little bit more intense.

  “Am I doing it poorly?”

  “By no means. You are doing well.” I sprinkled some more sand on his side of the table. “I enquire only as I assume you come from a household with servants?” I knew very well that Governor Dudley’s house was the finest in the colony. At the time it was built, Winthrop had made a scandal of it, decrying its sumptuary excesses.

  “We have one, an indentured person. When I was a child, of course—but perhaps you are not aware—my father was in his seventieth year when I was born. I was his Benjamin, indeed. He died when I was but four years old and my mother remarried soon after and removed to Duxbury. My stepfather is the Reverend Allen. He mostly had the raising of me. Although I did bide for a time with my elder sister, Anne Bradstreet, and she of course has a larger household, with several servants.”

  I stopped scrubbing and straightened. “Anne Bradstreet? Our poet?”

  “You know her work?”

  “Of course. I find it remarkable.”

  He looked at me with greater interest. “I shall tell her, when next I write. She will be glad to know of one of her own sex who reads and appreciates her. Few can. You know Latin? The classics?”

  I nodded.

  “Extraordinary. I had thought my sister unique in this.”

  I went back to scrubbing the table. The scrape of clout on deal was an odd accompaniment to the rich lines of verse, dense with scholarly allusion, that now filled my head. When I had first come upon the poems I had taken great heart from them. If she, like me, a woman of the wilderness, had studied and mastered these things, then so might I. Since then I had got several of her poems by heart.

  His young face was scrutinizing me closely. “I expect you find the privations here difficult to bear with?”

  “I admit, I do. It is difficult, in many ways. As it must be for you.”

  “Well, yes, although I would not like to own it. May I speak frankly, Mistress Mayfield?”

  Conscious of his courtesy in addressing me so, I nodded.

  “To be quite honest, I do not think well of being required to room with salvages, such as those I understand are known to you. I cannot think how you and your brother abide being in such close quarters with them. I imagine it tries your patience, as it does my own. I would be glad of some counsel as to how you manage to bear it.” I gave him no reply other than a cold glare. He barely glanced at me, then went on scrubbing. “I wrote to my stepfather and asked that I be allowed to board upon the town, when the first of them came here. He wrote me back and said he was not in purse to board me out. I do not see why they cannot be boarded elsewhere, as the funds for their education are limitless, seemingly. You know, I suppose, that it comes, all of it, from England, where the cause of Christianizing the salvages is well supported. I have heard that the new building, the Indian College as they call it, over yonder in the Harvard yard, cost in excess of four hundred pounds of English money. Can you credit such a sum? For salvages. While English scholars crowd into a leaking, drafty ruin. Of course, no sooner was it up than President Chauncy was canny enough to see its uses. He has filled its rooms with English students, who had been in such cramped quarters. A cunning ruse, do you not think? To get so fine a building in such a way…”

  I wondered if what he said was true. If so, it seemed an injustice to those religious persons that their money be employed contrary to their mind. Perhaps, though, it was simple prudence of Master Chauncy to put the building to use while he awaited the matriculation of its intended occupants, all of whom were either undertaking preparatory instruction here or with Master Weld at his school in Roxbury.

  But young Dudley had not had done with the subject. “My stepfather wrote that I must be patient, and console myself with the thought that I would not long be inconvenienced by the salvages, their nature not fitting them for the rigors, you know, of a Christian education.” He paused his sanding then, and leaned on his clout, considering. “I am not sure that I agree with his reasoning on this latter point. Those here, at least, seem uncommonly well suited. One or two of the newcomers, indeed … But these are the ones instructed by your late father, I think?”

  I inclined my head.

  “I suppose they were with you for some time, plucked out of the wilderness at a tender age?”

  The heat had been rising under my skin for some time. I clenched the clout in my fist, to conceal the tremor in my hand. “By no means,” I replied, as evenly as I could. “One, in particular, had the benefit of my father’s instruction for a very little time before God saw fit to…” I had no wish to say more. “I thank you,” I said, relieving him of his clout. “But I do believe Master Corlett would prefer to find you laying yourself to your book.”

  Dudley’s words prickled me like a hair shirt all that day. After, I resolved, for my peace of mind, to avoid any suc
h intimate exchanges. I would simply tend to the boys’ physical needs and leave their moral state to Corlett. And so my days passed by in a dull blur of toil. The Lord’s Day would arrive and I would lie upon my pallet and try vainly to recall something that had occurred, of note, to distinguish the week just passed from the one before it. Then I would get myself reluctantly to meeting, to sit through preaching whose narrowness sat ill upon the broad foundations of faith that my father had set down. Somewhen during those tedious weeks, as the weather hardened, the day dawned on which I turned seventeen, but it passed and no one made note of it, not even myself.

  And then, one chill evening, Master Corlett first spoke to me of Anne. It had become a habit in him to invite me to his chamber for a conference at day’s end. He would enquire of the small matters of the household, always apologizing for the many wants we faced and complimenting me on this or that shift I had made to do more with less. Then he would turn to the matter of the boys, and each one’s character, and how he did. Although he was forbearing in his words regarding Makepeace, I knew well enough he was troubled in mind to find my brother so behind hand with his studies. Of Caleb and Joel, he was laudatory, but always, when he spoke of them, it was with an eyebrow raised, as if he doubted his own judgment of their progress. Often, as on the first night, he would ramble off into reminiscences of earlier times, or into his philosophy of education and its necessary place in the success of the colonies. His thoughts seemed to run ahead of his words, and if I was very tired it was quite hard, sometimes, to sift together the fragments of his sentences. So these conferences, although interesting to me, were also often quite trying, and I would be thinking of my pallet long before he was willing to let me go to it.

  This night, he was quite agitated. “I mentioned to you, I think, my expectation of a Nipmuc pupil who might soon be joining us?” I had a vague memory that he might have said something of the sort. “I think I hinted to you that this was an exceptional case. So it is, most exceptional. And I must allow that I am at a loss as to how … in any case … quite an odd request … but from such a source, one must….”

  I sat there, studying the new blister on my hand, my mind drifting, until suddenly he said that which got my full attention.

  “… an Indian maid, Anne. The governor, generally speaking no lover of the native people, as I am sure you know—he did lead the militia against the Pequot in that lamentable business—has taken a fancy to this girl, whom he found already an abecedarian. He took her into his own household some months since and sent her to a dame school nearby to his residence, in Boston, where it seems that, at age twelve, she has outstripped the mistress in learning. He says she is quite a curiosity, and it is his whim that I have her here for one year and see of what more she might be capable. He then intends to take her into service in his household as governess or something of that kind and show off her abilities to his diverse guests, in order to wring more funds from our English benefactors. She comes already with a generous stipend from the Society’s funds, but even were this not the happy case, how to refuse a request of the governor? Still, I am troubled in mind, sorely troubled, as to how to accommodate this girl….” He leaned forward. “I have never instructed a girl—even my own daughter had a governess—I suggested the same to the governor, but he would have her here. He wants to be sure, he says, that her wits are taxed just as the other pupils, so that there can be no question as to her abilities. All very well, indeed, for him to indulge his fancies. But what am I to do with an Indian girl? I can hardly include her in the same classroom…. The disruption would … no. It cannot be. I am, truly, at a loss as to how to go on, and she comes here within the sennight.”

  “Cannot she be boarded upon the town and come to you for private instruction?”

  “I had thought of that. But then we should loose the benefit of most of her stipend. As you know as well as I, our wants here are many, and the stipend, as I said, is uncommonly generous…. I do not like to ask you … who live so far beneath your station as it is … to take a bedfellow,… but I do not see another way….”

  I felt a pang of dismay at that. My only peace was when I lay my head down at night and I was loath to surrender that shred of solitude for an enforced intimacy with a stranger. And yet my interest to know more about this girl was much inflamed.

  She arrived a few days later, fetched hither in the governor’s own carriage. She was a tall girl for her stated age, slender, with thick black hair drawn into a tight braid that was not pinned up, but fell from beneath her cap and reached nearly to her waist. She was dressed in a good gray worsted—imported, not homespun—such as the governor’s own daughter might have worn. She had arranged her cap with the fold far forward, so that it hid much of her face, and she walked into the house with bent head and downcast gaze, which she did not raise as Master Corlettt showed her into his study, gesturing for me to come in also. I closed the door, aware of a great and uncommon stillness in the schoolroom across the passage, where every eye had been trained upon the doorway to catch a glimpse of the curious new pupil.

  It wasn’t until the master introduced her to me that the shadowy, heavily lashed eyelids flickered, and she raised her head and looked at me for just an instant, before dropping her chin again. Her skin was very dark brown and smooth, like a chestnut, drawn tight over the high cheekbones common to her kind. But her eyes were another thing—a deep, luminous green like moss refreshed by rainfall. I had never seen anyone of her people with eyes of such a color. She had her hands clasped before her, and I noticed that the knuckles were white against the dark brown of her skin. She was making a great effort to still a tremor. The poor girl was afraid. I spoke a kindly greeting in a low voice. Then I glanced at Master Corlett with a meaning look. “Perhaps your interview might wait? Let me take Anne with me to the kitchen for a bever.” Master Corlett mopped his brow, which was sweating, despite the cold. “Very good, very good,” he said and, greatly relieved, returned to the classroom full of boys, where he knew very well how to get on.

  I ushered her to the kitchen and explained that she was to share my pallet there. A sigh passed through her thin frame. At first, I took it that the idea repelled her, she having been lodged in what I assumed must have been far superior quarters at the governor’s house. But then I saw that her face had relaxed its drawn, tense expression. She stood, waiting for instruction, so I invited her to sit and asked if she wished to eat something. She shook her head. She perched rigid upon the chair, as if staked to it. I poured her a pot of small beer, but she made no move to drink it.

  “I hear tell you are an outstanding scholar,” I said. She did not look at me. The green eyes were fixed on a burn mark in the surface of the table, her thick brows drawn into a frown, as though the blackened wood was displeasing to her.

  “Might I know how you began upon your course of study?”

  She drew in a breath, as if she were about to speak, but uttered no word.

  “What are you afraid of?” I asked her suddenly, in Wampanaontoaonk. Her head lifted sharply, the green eyes wide with astonishment. For a moment, I was back on the island, a girl her own age once again, dripping pond water, as the same look of wonderment lit the face of a wild heathen boy in deerskins. It seemed she understood me, but I could not be sure, as I did not know how closely Wampanaontoaonk might relate to the Nipmuc’s speech.

  “How come you to know that tongue?” She spoke in barely accented English, her voice low.

  “My father was a missionary, and he spoke it. But I truly learned from a friend who is Wampanoag. We grew up together…. I should say … we spent some time, when children, in each other’s…” This was more information than I had meant to offer, and I trailed off. But since she did not offer anything in return, I tried to come at my earlier question again. “And you? How did you come to learn English?”

  “I was raised to it.”

  “Did your parents—?”

  “My parents died. Spotted fever. All the village lay ill wi
th it. I was taken away by an English fur trader who passed by at that time.”

  “What town did he bring you to?”

  “No town.”

  “You lived in the wilderness?” She nodded. “Was it he who taught you your letters, or his wife?”

  She looked up for an instant and then down again, rubbing her fingertip over the scorch mark.

  “There was no wife.”

  “You lived alone with this Englishman, in the wild?”

  “Until he died, a half year since.”

  “Who has cared for you since then?”

  “I tried to walk back to my country, to see if any of my family yet lived. But the constables caught me upon the road.”

  I suppose that they took her for an indentured runaway. “Did they lock you up?” She nodded. “Did they mistreat you?” Her only answer was a shrug.

  “How came the governor, then, to hear of your case?”

  “I wrote to him.”

  In terse sentences, she explained how she had asked to be allowed to return to the western woodlands from whence she had been plucked years since, and the flurry of attention that had followed the governor’s receipt of her letter. He denied her request to return to the remnant of her people. Instead he had taken her into his household and sent her to the dame school.

  “When I spoke to the mistress in Latin, they said I must come here.”

  “Latine loqueris?” I asked, surprised. The master had seemed to think he was meant to be starting her on that language.

  “Some,” she replied. “But I do not know that I pronounce correctly, having got it from an accidence.”

  “The master will be very glad to know you have made a start, I am sure of it. Shall I fetch him? Do you feel ready to speak with him now?”

  Her hand shot out across the table and grasped my wrist. It was a soft hand. A lady’s hand. I had not seen, in my time, a hand so unblemished as hers. Certainly not my own. Not my mother’s. So this man, whosoever he was, had not set her to hard chores in their wilderness redoubt. The green eyes scanned my face avidly for a moment. “Please. No.” She was trembling again.