Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

  “Your brother reports that you have subjected him to most grievous execration, even unto uttering an oath to God. What say you?”

  “Well, yes, master, I did, but—”

  “There are no buts in this matter, Bethia Mayfield.” He stood. “Here in Cambridge, in the absence of your grandfather, your elder brother is your head and guide, to whom you should submit yourself. And yet you cast aside his guidance as if you have more wit and care than he. Since you confess your sin freely, and in light of your unexceptionable behavior until this day, I see no need to involve the court in the matter.”

  “The court?” I had been stunned into silence by the severity of the master’s tone and his unaccustomed harshness toward me, but at this I could hold my peace no longer. “Why should the court care about what I said to my brother in a private conference?”

  “Leave aside for a moment your abusive carriage towards your brother and your hectoring and unbecoming speeches. As a minister’s daughter you must know that uttering an oath to God is a grave sin. As a magistrate’s granddaughter, I expected you also to be fully aware that it is a crime against the laws of this colony. I do not know what may be your grandfather’s pleasure should such cases come in his way, but here the General Court exacts stern penalties upon it, even unto driving an awl through the off ending tongue.”

  My hand flew unbidden to my mouth. “That very kind of zealotry is the reason my grandfather quit this colony and took ship for the island,” I said. My head really was aching now: a sharp, stabbing pain that felt as if the torturer’s awl had been driven between my eyes. Even so, I should have known better. Had I laid a finger upon a red-hot iron, I would have had wit enough to snatch it back, not reach forth and grasp the thing. Where was my self-mastery, my long self-schooling in discretion? I seemed of a sudden compelled to speak my every inner thought, to puke them out, like bile.

  He gave me over to Makepeace for beating, and I shall not write of it, only to say that, when I turned, between blows, to look at my brother, I saw that his eyes were glazed, his lips moist and his face slack with pleasure. I did not look at him again, even as I lowered my skirt and thanked him, as I was obliged to do, for correcting me.

  There was no private place to look to my weeping stripes, so I neglected them, and a day or two later they commenced to fester. I had noticed, with the boys’ various cuts and scrapes, that nothing in this place healed speedily, as young flesh should. There were of course no salves or anything of the kind. I had had it in mind to compound some, later in the spring, when I could find the right plants, so as to have store on hand for the younger boys’ scrapes and bruises, and for the rare occasions when the master laid the switch to them. I had not thought to need such a product for myself. Anne saw me struggling awkwardly to wrap a linen piece around my angry sores. She drew from her own box a bottle of some sharp-scented, cooling lotion and applied it with a gentle and practiced hand.

  I told no one of the beating. But Anne must have disclosed something about it to Caleb. When I passed by him in the hall, he bent his head close to mine and whispered, “I will see to your brother.”

  “By no means!” I hissed. “You must not think of it!” But he had already gone by me, his attention seemingly engaged by the spine of the book he held in his hand. The next day, Makepeace could not rise from his bed. A gripe had seized him, so severe that he lay moaning in pain as each spasm wracked his belly. That, when he was not wobbling, wan and weak, to the necessary, which he was obliged to do more than a dozen times in as many hours. I confess it; I am no saint. I took some pleasure in his suffering, though I did ask Caleb’s advice as to how his people might compound a binding draught should such a condition beset them, and sent, in due course, to the apothecary for the remedies he named.

  As for me, my punishment was not done with. It continued the following Lord’s Day, when I was required to make public amends. To do so, I had to stand forth in afternoon meeting and declare my remorse for having inadvisedly and blasphemously expressed myself. For the week thereafter I was obliged to wear a paper pinned to my breast which bore the words of the psalm: I will take heed unto my ways that I sin not with my tongue; I will keep my mouth with a bridle. This was unfortunate, as the younger pupils felt licensed to make sport of me by poking out tongues or neighing like a horse every time my back was to them.

  When the sennight had passed I tore the paper from my bodice and cast it into the fire that warmed the oven for the morning’s loaves. As I watched it burn, I told myself that I must root out from my heart the bitterness that had set its seed there. I tried my best to pluck up the anger, the mortification and, yes, even hatred. It had come at last to this, that I felt actual hatred towards my closest living kinsman. I found myself, at prayer, chiding God for taking Zuriel and Solace, and leaving Makepeace. This was a wickedness. I knew it. So I tried to vision these ill thoughts as something written on a parchment that could be balled up and burned away to wither in the flame and be carried off like smoke. But the passions are not corporeal things that can be unmade so easily. The stripes from my beating had scabbed over, at last. I could not say the same of my injured spirit.

  That night, the master called me to his chamber. I went, heavyhearted, and sat upon the rush stool, my hands folded in my lap and my gaze upon the pattern in the turkey carpet. If, as the minister at meeting had proclaimed: “It is the whore that is clamorous,” then I would school myself, once again, to be silent.

  “The maid Anne tells me you do not eat.” I felt the master’s watery blue eyes upon me. “Indeed, you have a pinched, spare look. It will not do. This unfortunate business is done now, and over. I feel confident that you have seen your error and have repented it. There is no cause for you to continue to mortify yourself through fasting.”

  I did not make him any reply.

  “You cannot hope to manage your work if you do not eat.”

  Without raising my eyes, I whispered: “Does the master have cause to be dissatisfied by my work?”

  “No, no, no. That is not at all what I meant. Your work is quite satisfactory—indeed, exemplary—as always. I do not like to see you so woebegone, that is all. Can you not put this thing behind you?”

  I continued to stare at the floor. When he saw that I would not be drawn on the matter, he changed the subject.

  “How do you think she gets on, the Indian maid?”

  I lifted my shoulders in a shrug.

  “The two lads, Caleb and Joel, have taken it upon themselves to befriend her. I see no harm in it. You know them well: you have found them to be entirely honorable?”

  I nodded. He waited for me to add something, but I did not.

  “She seems less shy with them, at least. Do you think she is content here?” I replied by opening my hands in my lap. I might have said a great deal on the subject, at another time. It seemed to me that Anne had bloomed under the tutelage of Joel and Caleb. She no longer trembled at the slightest cause, and even seemed to sleep more restfully at night. But I pressed my lips together stubbornly. If silence was what they required from a woman, then silence they should have.

  The master stood up suddenly and walked the few steps to the small diamond-paned casement that gave onto Crooked Street. “This will not do, you know. Will not do at all. I have come to rely on you, you see, and now, because of this business with your brother … you’ll not speak to me. You’ll not even look at me. And you are putting yourself in the way of becoming ill. How am I to get on?” He turned around then, wringing hands that were ropey with prominent blue veins. “Am I to take it that you do not want to marry this fellow—this islander—Merry, is it?”

  I looked up then, and met his eye for the first time. “No,” I whispered. “I do not.”

  “Is there something wrong with the man?” I shook my head. “Then what, exactly, is it that you object to? Surely there must be something wrong with him for you to take on so?”

  “Nothing is wrong with Master Merry,” I said in a low voice. “
There is a great deal wrong, in my view, with Makepeace Mayfield, who would buy and sell his sister as if she were a sow.”

  “Well. Quite. I see. Though you do know, you must surely realize, that you mayn’t usurp authority from those who have been made head of you.” He sat down again at his desk and commenced to finger the pens I had mended for him. “Whole of it, most unfortunate. Your guardian, your very esteemed grandfather, he stands behind your brother in this. So, even if one were to raise, as I might, as his schoolmaster, raise—the matter of your brother’s judgment, raise a question as to his maturity, as it were—there is still your grandfather to be managed. Thing of it is this; I do not want to release you from the indenture, and you, seemingly, do not wish to be released. Not if it means marrying this man, albeit you say you find him unexceptionable. It seems a strange business to me, that you would rather toil here as a servant than make what your brother represents as a most advantageous match. But what do I know of women and their fancies…?”

  A coughing spasm wracked him. Like so many in the school, he had a wetness in the chest that seemed to last all winter long. I wished, again, that I had at hand the proper herbs for a good expectorant. He dabbed at his mouth with a square of linen. I had hemmed some for him, finding his own stained and threadbare. I saw him run his finger over the place where I had embroidered his initials. His eyes, as he looked up at me, were tired and rheumy, and very sad.

  “Your brother confides he intends to leave the school, so you will be here, serving in payment of a debt beyond the which he owes. I know full well that legally you are bound to me, whether he completes his year or not. And neither am I obliged in law to agree to sell the indenture to any person. I don’t wish to be uncivil to your grandfather. But neither do I wish to let you go, all the more so since I see you so very unhappy.”

  He was clearly distressed, and not only at the thought of losing a capable housekeeper. He got up again and came toward me. “Dear to me, yes. You are. In a very short while, I have come to feel … our talks, they bring me … I don’t suppose you would consider … that is, I wonder if you have any…” He had turned a pale, putty color. He reached out a liver-spotted hand. He lifted my chin. “That is to say…” The pads of his fingers were shrunken and fleshless, the loose skin cool and dry. “I do not know … I cannot tell … what your views might be on the prospect of a different marriage … to … to…”

  I shot up off the stool, toppling it beneath me. He was not a tall man and suddenly we stood, eye to eye.

  “You?” I blurted.

  He looked startled by my violent reaction. He ran a hand over his crown, raking the thin, sand-colored hairs across the mottled flesh of his balding pate.

  “Me? Of course not! My dear Bethia. You misapprehend me. I was going to say, to my son. To my son, Samuel. You have seen Samuel at meeting. Indeed, I introduced you, when first you came to us.”

  He had righted the stool, and gestured for me to sit down upon it. I did so, in a state of some distraction. I did not hear the half of what next he said. My mind was busy conjuring Samuel Corlett, probationer fellow at Harvard, whom I knew only as an austere presence beside his father in meeting, and a rather less austere, more animated figure when I had glimpsed him, gown billowing, walking in the college yard with one or another of the scholars he served as tutor. He did not visit the school, his duties requiring him to be at the college of an evening. But I knew that the master passed a good part of the Lord’s Day visiting his son in his college rooms.

  The master was asking my age. I gathered my wandering wits and made him an answer. “I will be eighteen in October, master.”

  “He is twenty-six. No yearling, but neither by any means a graybeard. A considerable difference in age is no bad thing, if the parties … But I put the stern before the bow here. Samuel expressed himself to me of an interest in being acquainted when first you came to me. But when I broached this with your brother, he led me to believe that your affections were engaged by this island lad, Merry. The way he framed it, you came here all but handfasted. So I told Samuel. But now, you say that the business with Merry is by no means as your brother presented it … and my son still … the short of it is, I told him today I would speak to you. He was impressed by your eloquence, in meeting … that unfortunate matter….”

  How odd. At the very moment I had been called upon to reduce myself before the community, I had, apparently, elevated someone’s estimation of me. It had crossed my mind, as I stood to speak my confession, what a remarkable thing it was that the rare time a woman’s voice might be heard in our church was when she was execrating herself.

  “He is a serious man, excellent scholar, high in the regard of President Chauncy. And when I told him you knew Latin … I will let him press his own suit of course, but I think you will find…”

  The picture of Samuel Corlett was becoming clearer in my mind as the master spoke. I was thinking to myself that he must have favored his late mother, for he looked nothing like his father. For one thing, he was very dark, the opposite of the freckled, fair-haired Master Corlett, and a good head and shoulders taller. He was a plain man, not handsome—his nose had been broken, perhaps in some childhood mishap, and no one of any skill had seen to it. It splayed across his face, giving him, at first glance, the cast of a ruffian rather than the look of a refined scholar. But his eyes belied that first impression. These were deep-set, quite black, watchful and intelligent. Thinking on it, I now realized that I had often looked up, at meeting or while passing near him upon the common, and noticed those eyes upon me. What harm could there be in agreeing to meet with him? I turned the matter over in my mind.

  The master had stopped rambling. The silence lengthened.

  “Forgive me, Master, for my earlier misunderstanding,” I said at last. He gave a dry little laugh. His hands were folded on the desk in front of him. He let them fall open and raised his brows, questioning.

  I looked down, and fiddled with my cuff. “I would not, that is, I have no objection….” Of the two of us, of a sudden, I was the addlepated, tongue-tied one. I took a deep breath.

  “What I mean to say is, I would be pleased to receive your son, Samuel Corlett.”

  XV

  In the event, it was Samuel Corlett who received me. The master and I had reached the same conclusion, though we never voiced it one to the other. Since it was probable that nothing would come of this conference, there could be no profit in alerting Makepeace that the master and I together plotted to flout his will. Better, then, to meet Samuel Corlett in his college rooms, where we would be neither watched nor eavesdropped upon.

  My brother had made known his desire to quit the school, and waited only on word from the mariner on whose sloop he had previously traveled of a shipment of goods headed for the island. He did not attend the classroom. This made it easier for me to avoid all but the most perfunctory contact with him. When the Lord’s Day came, I walked to the meeting house with Master Corlett and set out after also in his company. What then could seem more natural than to join the master in an afternoon visit upon his son. The weather was unsteady, in the way the townsfolk said was typical of a Cambridge spring: a sudden rise in temperature that roused the senses, then, just as sudden, snow again. Even as a warm day brought relief from the long winter, each thaw uncovered the town’s ugly middens, awakening their stench and setting it in competition with the sudden, elusive fragrance of an early blossom.

  Samuel Corlett had moved into vacant rooms in the Indian College, which had housed no native scholars so far. It presently had in residence five or six English scholars, and a young Nipmuc man, John Printer, who tended to the college press. This press—the only one of its kind in the colony—had formerly occupied space in the college president’s house, but Master Chauncy had a large household and was very glad to have it removed to the Indian College hall.

  I was curious to see where Caleb and Joel would be housed, should they matriculate. It was a good building—showing every penny of th
e four hundred pounds young Dudley said it had cost—although the brick walls held the cold air inside them and some parts of it remained unfinished. As we passed by the chambers and studies, I saw that some of the interior walls were bare, not yet plastered, and several windows were oilpapered and unglazed.

  We climbed the central staircase, and Samuel Corlett showed us into his own study, which was a large room with a diamond-paned window looking back across the yard towards the northern end of the dilapidated college hall he had recently vacated. “I could not have received you with any degree of comfort, over yonder,” he said. “Of course, I must not get too settled in this place.” His father smiled. “Indeed you should not. You will be ousted soon enough by my brace of likely young prophets, Caleb and Joel. When they matriculate, you will be obliged to give up these rooms to whomever Chauncy selects as their tutor.”

  “And then I shall have to wedge myself back into the cabinets that pass for chambers at the old hall,” his son replied. “But I shall welcome the privation, if it advances the cause for which this building was made.”

  There was a good fire in the study grate and I was glad to give up my cloak and mittens. There were two large bookshelves, full, with several more volumes piled in small stacks upon the floor. There was also a cabinet of curiosities which drew my eye, filled as it was by skeletons of diverse small creatures and jars of organs in preservative. Samuel Corlett saw my eyes upon these things. “These do not disgust you, I hope?”

  “By no means,” I said. “I am much interested in the natural sciences, although I have never been able to study them in a formal way. Forgive me for asking so directly, but I understood you were taking a higher degree in theology, not physiology?”