Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

  He smiled. “You understand correctly. But sometimes, I allow myself to be distracted. Reading is the mind’s good provender, but one wishes, at times, to engage the hands, with the mind, in learning. A botanic garden, a mechanical workshop, an anatomy laboratory such as they have, in the universities of Europe—one day, perhaps, Harvard too might boast of such things. I would study physiology and theology both, were it in my power.”

  “Like the pawaaws…” The words were out before I could snatch them back.

  Samuel laughed. “You are too long out upon your island amidst the salvages, if you think those warlocks know aught worthwhile of physic. Even so, I think they are wise who say that the soul has its part to play in the health of the body.”

  His rebuke was made in the most amiable manner; still, I felt I had stepped into a mire, and did not wish to plod further on such uncertain footing. In some areas I might not show myself to advantage. I changed the subject as naturally as I could, shifting my gaze to the bookshelves and remarking upon the great number of volumes. His face became animated. “It is my personal library—my one extravagance.” He had seemed pleasant enough, but as soon as I showed an interest in his books, he came fully alive, taking down his pet volumes, expounding on when he had first read them, or where he had acquired them. “Do you admire poetry, Mistress Mayfield? Then you may like to see this—by our colony’s first poet—the sister of one of my father’s pupils.” He thrust a slim volume into my hands. It was “The Tenth Muse,” by Anne Bradstreet. I exclaimed, and said how much I admired her.

  “How came her work in your way, out there upon your island?”

  “You may well ask,” I said, smiling. “The merchants who ply the channel are not apt to include poetry in their cargoes of necessities. Though I think one might soon come to deem it a necessity, who has the good fortune to be able to read it often.”

  I had been looking down at the book in my hands, and when I glanced up I was startled by the transformation in his face. His expression had softened, yet his gaze seemed more intense. “In any case, I came upon her poems by merest chance. Someone had used a page of a broadside to wrap a bottle. It was my habit, always, to look over any such scrap that might come our way—news, as you can imagine, is scarce and valuable to us—and this one rewarded me most richly. One of Mistress Bradstreet’s poems, upon the late Queen Elizabeth, was printed there. You cannot know, Mister Corlett, how it thrilled me to learn that a woman might write and publish poetry, and such poetry! And such a woman—a faithful, blameless daughter, an esteemed wife and mother. My own dear mother shared my admiration for the work, when I showed it her, and she petitioned my father to seek out others of her poems for me.” I closed my eyes, and words I had committed to memory came easily:

  “Now say, have women worth? Or have they none?

  “Or had they some, but with our Queen, is’t gone?

  “Let such as say our sex is void of reason,

  “Know ’tis a slander now but once was treason.”

  That line always brought a smile to my lips, and when I opened my eyes, both the Corletts were staring at me. I colored slightly. But then Samuel smiled too. His teeth were as crooked as his nose, but the effect was not unpleasant, for his eyes came alight in their deep recesses. “That has always been among the poems of hers that I most admire,” he said. “She is courageous, is she not? She goes right to the heart of it: A woman as exemplar for men.” He held out his hand for the book, and came easily upon the page he sought. “Here, she has it—Elizabeth is a ‘pattern of kings.’” A rare inversion of our present, lived reality. But one I think you would favor?”

  He had a serious look now, and I did not want to give the wrong answer. I felt like one of the scholars he tutored, and I found the notion agreeable. How would it be, to have a husband who strove to elicit one’s ideas, with whom one could, over months and years of companionship, hone and refine them? Such a life would be something, indeed. I thought of Caleb’s reference, on the beach—it seemed an age since—to Prometheus, stealing fire. So might I steal learning, with such a husband. I thought of the alternative: arranging my face into an expression of interest while my spouse expounded on the conditions of pasture or the virtues of an undershot millstone, the struggle to access a book—any book—and the loneliness of longing to explore its weighty ideas and having no one with whom to share them.

  “I do not ask for an inversion, Master Corlett. But perhaps the very volume in my hands bears witness to the fact that women might sometimes be fit to stand beside men, and not always and in every case behind them.”

  The elder Corlett raised his eyebrows at that, but his son nodded, considering. “Well put, though a body may only have one head, is that not so?”

  “True. But if you speak of marriage and the management of a household—” and here I felt the color rise again—“perhaps two heads offer twice the wit when dealing with the challenges of raising and sustaining a godly family.”

  He laughed at that. “Your own wit makes the case most clearly, Mistress Mayfield.”

  Wanting to get onto safer ground, I turned the subject then, to the college and Samuel’s role as fellow. He explained the course of study, speaking warmly of the scholars he tutored. “Master Chauncy of course gives all the lectures. My role is to discourse with my scholars and examine their understanding of what has been taught them.” A tutor was assigned to a freshman class, and rose with them. Master Corlett’s class were junior sophisters, who would enter their senior year in leaf fall. It was a class of some distinction, having in its number three of President Chauncy’s boys—a pair of twins and an elder brother, all having matriculated together. There was also John Bellingham, the governor’s son, a Weld from the Roxbury schoolmaster’s family and several ministers’ boys. But Samuel Corlett spoke most warmly of two others in his charge. One, young John Parker, was the son of a butcher, and had paid his tuition in sides of beeve and flitches of bacon. “He may not have been born a ‘son of the prophets,’ as the lads here like to style themselves,” Corlett said, “but he has made a prodigious effort at learning.” The other was John Whiting, a dreamy youth “so abstracted from temporal concerns” that he had oft times arrived for lectures with his shoes upon the wrong feet.

  And in such discourse so we passed a pleasant hour. As we rose to leave, the father proceeded a little ahead of me, while the son helped me with my cloak.

  “You will like, I am sure, to visit the college library—John Harvard’s books, you know, form the spine of the collection, but there have been many interesting additions since his most generous bequest. I am sure President Chauncy would not object to me showing it you, at a convenient time.”

  I said, of course, that I would like that above all things, any time that I might be spared from my duties. As soon as those words were out I regretted them. I did not wish to remind Samuel Corlett that I was a lowly indentured servant. He seemed to sense my discomfort. As he passed me my mittens, he took my hand between his own.

  “What an odd course fate charts for us, does it not? Bereavement is the unwelcome current that forced you to an unintended harbor. But here, perhaps, the vessel lies that will carry you onward to the place where you were always meant to go.”

  I had been looking up into his black eyes, but now I looked away. This stilted little speech had a stale air about it, as if he had fashioned it in advance of our meeting. He was moving swiftly. Too swiftly, perhaps. Could any man know his mind, as this man seemed to imply that he did, on so slight an acquaintance?

  On the short walk home, and then, as I set out the supper things, I pondered this, and tried to sort my own feelings: intense pleasure in the conversation, an undeniable attraction of mind, an unfamiliar sense of being admired in a very particular way. Makepeace had liked to claim that Noah Merry mooned over me, and certainly he had sought me out and seemed pleased to be in my company. But I had never felt anything from him quite like the sense of decided attention that had emanated from Samuel Corl
ett. There was an entirely different quality to their regard. Noah Merry was like a pup, full of zest, ready to lick a friendly hand. Samuel Corlett was more like a wise old collie, head on paws, eyes following his one master’s every move.

  Like that collie, he proved set on his task. The next morning, when the boys were bent-headed over their slates in the schoolroom, there was the lightest of taps on the kitchen door. I lifted the latch, and there he stood, dark and tall, the scholar’s gown falling from his shoulders like the cloak of the Black Knight in the old tale. His arms were laden with boughs of apple blossom. He lifted a branch, high over my head, and shook it, so that the petals showered me, releasing a heady scent that promised spring. As I laughed with pleasure, he thrust the boughs into my arms, and then, from the folds of his gown he drew forth the Bradstreet volume. “’Tis for you,” he said. “Mistress Bradstreet belongs with you—a kindred spirit among her own sex.”

  “But I cannot—it is too much….”

  He raised a hand to hush me. He was already stepping back from the door. He smiled—that crooked, crinkled smile. “It is not entirely generous, my gift to you. I entertain the hope that the book might, soon enough, find its way back under my roof.” And then he turned on his heel and strode in long swift steps towards the college.

  I closed the door and leaned against it. Anne sat with her back to me, eyes down, feigning great interest in Tully. But as I came around the table to place the blossoms in the trough, I saw that she was struggling to suppress a smile.

  She must have said something to Caleb—she spent a good deal of time with him, and with Joel. The master, unwilling to have her in the general classes, sanctioned the three of them to meet in a small seminar to practice disputations. All day, I noticed Caleb’s eyes upon me, his expression questioning. I longed to speak with him. He was the one person to whom I might unfold the turmoil of my heart and expect in return some sound counsel. This did not seem possible, however, as there was no one moment of the day when we found ourselves alone. But then I heard him begging permission from the master that the three be allowed to hold their seminar out of doors, the weather being fair. He made the case that all could do with air and exercise, and could quite well dispute together as they walked. When the master assented, Caleb turned, as if in afterthought, and asked if I might be pressed to go too, by way of chaperone for Anne.

  “Yes, quite. That would be proper—” he looked at me. “If you, Bethia, will not mind giving up some time to it?”

  And so we set out. As soon as we turned off Crooked Street, Joel and Anne increased their pace, as if by arrangement, so that Caleb and I could fall just far enough behind to have private speech. Caleb, as ever, was direct. “Anne says you have a suitor. She said he as good as proposed marriage to you this morning.”

  I turned my face to him. “It is true. I believe he will ask me, formally, at the first opportunity. I don’t know how I should answer him.”

  “Marriage is a heavy choice for an English woman.”

  “Why do you fashion it thus? Surely for any woman?”

  “Not so, for ours. A squa does not cease to be a person, in our law, just because she has got herself a husband. In most cases, he will go to live with her family, not she with his, so her daily state changes little. And if, at some later time, she wants to leave him and be married to another one, then that can be settled through parley.”

  “Perhaps so,” I said, bridling a little. “But neither will the husband I choose take a second wife, or third, as I have heard tell happens among your heathen kin.”

  He tossed his head and shrugged at that, and we walked on a little way. Then he asked me: “What does your heart say, about this son of Corlett’s?”

  “It seems to say yes. But I cannot tell if it truly is yes to Samuel Corlett or no to a fate forced on me by others. Caleb, I have not had a vast experience in choosing for myself. Yes, I did choose to come here, but that was an act of duty, and I thought that God’s will was clear in it. It seemed the godly thing. This marriage … it is not so clear what God wants of me in it.”

  “It is—what did we just now learn that the Greeks say of it? Hubris?—to think we can know God’s will. The better question—the one question, in this matter—is, what do you, Bethia, want?”

  No one had ever asked me that before. What did I want? I wanted my old life, before all of its losses. I wanted mother, to guide me through this time as only a loving mother can guide a daughter in such things. I wanted to be Storm Eyes again, leaving dutiful Bethia carelessly behind me, shrugging her off, like a cloak left crumpled on the sand.

  What I truly wanted—Zuriel at my side, Solace in my arms—I could not have. But I did not share these thoughts with Caleb. Instead, I opened my heart to him, in rambling fragments, on the choice that now seemed set before me. My thoughts were all confusion, unformed shards. These Caleb drew from me piecemeal, prompting, with a question here and an observation there. When it was all of it out, he reordered and said my own thoughts back to me with greater clarity, the very way the master guided the pupils to muster their arguments in a disputation. Only then could I fashion it thus:

  The choice before me, it seemed, was a marriage to Noah Merry or to Samuel Corlett. With one came the island: its beauties, all of its abundance. I would live a plain life in a place where every step I took was sweet to me. Unless the years worked unwonted changes upon him, I would have in Merry a husband of easy temper, pleasant manner. It would be a life free from want: fine house, rich farm, prosperous mill. I could be useful there—that woman of valor from eshet chayil—useful to my household, useful also, perhaps, to the Takemmy people. In time, I might start a dame school for their children, even introduce the gospel, if the sonquem allowed it. The choice of Merry would be smiled upon by grandfather, and would not cause a rupture with Makepeace. This latter consideration was—I learned, somewhat to my surprise as I set it forth—not nothing to me, even after the way he had ill used me.

  If, on the other hand, I chose Samuel Corlett, I would be obliged to follow him and settle wheresoever his work took him, even if that were back across the seas to some England college or to a university in an outlandish foreign place such as Padua, where Harvard’s graduates had found their way from time to time. Most likely, it would be a life by the unlovely fens in the tight-pressed town of Cambridge, under the heel of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, part of a communion more harsh and zealous than the one in which I had been raised. To feed a family on a scholar’s scant pay would mean a life of thrift and want. But I would be married to a man whose mind I could admire. I would live among books and thinkers and conversations that engaged me, with every day the gift of learning some new thing. In such a life, I might be of some use to the young scholars—a female presence for boys like Caleb and Joel, torn away from family and familiars. I would be able to stay beside Caleb, to help him through what surely would be hardships in the college years to come. Perhaps, in time, I might even interest Samuel in tutoring the Indians—to help to build up the reputation of the Indian College would be a worthy achievement, sending forth, year by year, our newly minted prophets into the wilderness. Instead of helping one small Indian settlement, in such a way I might help many. Or perhaps Samuel himself might take a pulpit among the Indians—perhaps he might—there was no harm in dreaming, after all—agree to further my father’s work, back on the island. And while to choose him might at first seem less dutiful, more headstrong, I felt sure that grandfather would see the merits of the match, and in time bring Makepeace to accept it.

  When Caleb had helped me to marshal my thoughts as I have now set them down here, he turned to me. “You say this and so, this and so, all of the points important, in their way. But you say a great deal more of the life you will have and little of the man you will have it with. One important point you have not disclosed to me. I do not ask you to speak it, but only to ask it of yourself: Which man quickens your blood?”

  I gave him no answer, but even as he posed the q
uestion, the truth of the matter fell into my heart. The flush crept up my neck and prickled my scalp. There are some questions that can be answered, and some that cannot. And some questions that should never be asked, even of one’s self.

  I reached up and fumbled with my cap, pulling the fold forward to hide my scarlet face. Then I increased my pace so as to catch up with Anne and Joel.

  And now, I sit here, at the deal table, as Anne tosses in her sleep. The house creaks and shifts. A floorboard complains as a boy rises, in the attic, to make his water in a chamber pot. Outside, a tomcat howls. The master told me this evening that Samuel Corlett intends to call upon me tomorrow, and that I should be prepared to receive him alone.

  The candle end gutters. I reach out a hand, and touch a finger to the puddle of wax. It hardens on my fingertip and I peel it off, looking at the whorls impressed there. They say that each person’s finger bears a unique pattern upon it, although how they can say such a thing, without having made an impression of every person’s finger, I know not. The sorcerers and consorts of the devil say further that they can read one’s fate in the marks upon a hand. Truly, tonight, I wish it were so. I would know my fate.

  Bethia Merry. Bethia Corlett. I, Bethia Mayfield, must make this choice. Probably the last choice that will ever be entirely my own. The wick dips into the clear molten wax and the flame falters.

  I will have to make the decision in the dark.

  XVI

  To say I did not sleep that night would be a falsehood. I slept well. I was so tired that season, not the most severe mental disquiet could keep me wakeful.

  In the morning, I gazed at my face in the trough and wondered that I had been kept up even as long as I had by such speculations. That any man would want to marry me, such a haggard, hollow-eyed drab as I had become, strained all reason. I did, I confess it, take more than usual pains about my person that morning, pinning on a fresh cap and collar and doing what I could to trim and clean my ragged nails.