Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

  Master Corlett was suddenly sitting upright in his chair. “How can you possibly be so familiar with her case? The woman was surely dead and gone to her ultimate judgment before you were even born.”

  “But her words live,” I said. I was flustered now. I saw, too late, that I should not have opened my heart to him. He did not understand, any more than father had. My father had loved me dearly; Master Corlett, I believed, felt true affection for me. Both were learned men who devoted their lives to teaching others. Then why not me? Why did they want to confine me in the prison of my own ignorance? Why was it so wrong, in their eyes, that I should love what they loved? Would Samuel prove the same, in the end? Would he, too, strive to put a bridle on my mind and a branks upon my tongue? Once again, I had spoken too freely. I seemed too dense witted to learn the simple lesson: silence was a woman’s sole safe harbor.

  “Words? What words? I never heard that Mistress Hutchinson committed her heresies to the page.” I did not answer him. Belatedly, I recognized that the last thing I should be speaking about was an infamous instance of female outspokenness.

  But he was pressing me now. To maintain a surly silence would be worse. “What words do you speak about? Tell me!”

  “Her words to the General Court, master.” Grandfather had oft cited her case as one of the chief pricks that drove him to the island, to be free of such a harsh governance as would send a pregnant woman into a howling wilderness in midwinter, with nine children trailing after.

  “Do you mean to tell me you have read her testimony to the court?”

  I nodded.

  “How came you to do so?” He had a stricken look. I could not think that what I had done was so extraordinary as to provoke such a reaction in him.

  “They are kept at our meeting house, where she was tried,” I said. “It just—came to me—one day—that the records must lie there, where we come and go so often. And I thought I should like to know what she said. Since so many were convinced by her. At that time.”

  “And our minister let you read heretical testimony?”

  My cheeks were on fire now. “I did not apply to the minister.” My voice had shrunk to a bat squeak, almost inaudible.

  “How, then?”

  “I asked the sexton.” That poor man, simple and frail, had hardly understood what I required. But he had been glad to give me his broom when I offered to sweep the floors for him. He had fallen into a doze in the corner, and so I had ample time to search out the old record and page through it, to marvel at how she had parried every thrust of Winthrop and the others, shielding herself with both wit and prodigious knowledge of scripture so that they could not land a blow. And then, just at the end, when they would have been forced to let her walk free, exonerated, she offers to set forth to them her heretical beliefs. Offers. And so indicts herself. Exactly as I had just done.

  Master Corlett shook his head and wagged a crooked finger at me. “It was very wrong in you, Bethia. These things are not fit for eyes such as yours. You would not, I hope, drink from a spring that was befouled by a rotting corpse. Why then foul your mind with the rantings of a heretic?”

  There were many ways in which I could have answered him. I could have said that Hutchinson’s words, though clearly contrary to accepted doctrine, were by no means rantings. I could have said that one must study even incorrect opinions in order to learn how to discern their flaws. I could have said that I ached to read the words of a learned woman, because such women lived and died in silence while men alone set down their thoughts. But I had said too much already. So I answered him thus:

  “I am sorry, master. I see now it was very wrong in me. I thank you for correcting me in this matter.”

  “Very well said.” He looked relieved. “As for this situation at the college: you say you have applied for it already?” I nodded. He shook his head. “I will not cry you up for it. I cannot think I would do you any kindness to expose you in that way. Indeed, if I could, I would sink your chances there. But if I speak against your employment, it might be misapprehended, casting a shadow on your character. I would not have aught come to President Chauncy’s ears that might make him think ill of my son’s future wife, if such you are to be. But if the situation is offered, I beg you not accept it. And if you refuse to heed that counsel, then I advise you most ardently to accept this one: Keep the buttery hatch closed.”

  XXII

  “Name?”

  “Caleb.”

  “Caleb? Caleb what?”

  “Caleb … Cheeshahteaumauk.”

  “Cheshchamog?”

  “Cheeshahteaumauk.”

  “Outlandish name. I suppose you insist upon it? You will not like to take another? What was your father’s name?”

  “Nahnoso.”

  “No better. Sounds like a donkey’s bray. The other will have to serve. Caleb Chis-car-.” President Chauncy’s pen scraped across the parchment: “-ruimac. So be it.” He set down his pen and bridged his fingertips together upon the desk. He gazed at Caleb with an air of slight puzzlement, blinking a number of times, as if to clear the rheum from his eyes and get a better look at the specimen placed before him.

  I set down the tankards I was carrying for Chauncy and his clerk and backed up against the wall, guessing that my presence would not be noticed. Although I was but two days employed in this service, I had already learned that it was easy to be overlooked here. The scholars and their tutors lived in their own world, walled off from ordinary folk by their black cloaks, their Latin speech and their high thoughts. Samuel had told me that there was much talk, in the early days of the settlement, against the expense of building a college such as this one. It would have been easier, and cheaper, in that straightened time, to have the scholars boarded among the townsfolk, meeting together for classes, as the universities of Europe generally fashioned it. But the English who visioned this place had graduated from the colleges at Cambridge in England, and they aspired to what they had themselves known: a gated sanctuary where the boys and their tutors lived together, at a lofty remove from the town, with its miserable distractions and ungirt life. Scholars were not to leave the college yard, except by express permission of their tutors. In that way, it was supposed, they would eat, sleep and breathe their studies, encountering nothing that was not to the purpose of learning.

  It fell to the steward and his minions, such as myself, to deal with the world, to do what was necessary to keep the scholars fed and watered, shod and clad. There were five of us who served so: the steward, Goodman Whitby, his wife Maude, who was the cook, their lad George, who cleaned the scholars’ quarters, a laundress who came weekly, and myself, the scullery maid. We scuttled about our chores, as unremarked as ants.

  President Chauncy took a swallow of the small beer I had set down for him and dabbed at his lips with a crumpled handkin, still peering at Caleb. Caleb returned his gaze, sitting very straight in his chair. He was dressed in the plain, sober style that befit a scholar. I had sewed his collar myself, and taken some pains with it. It had a narrow border of drawn threadwork, and I had starched and ironed it perfectly. The white of it contrasted with the glossy black fall of his cropped hair. The year since our crossing had wrought a marked change in him. He had always been lean, but in the muscular way of an outdoorsman. Now he commenced to look thin, pared down by poor diet and indoor life. He was become, I would say, too spare for his tall frame, and his skin, a paler shade than seemed natural to him, had lost its luster.

  But he had gained something, too. I studied him, as he sat there, and tried to discern what it was. It came to me that there was a rigid discipline at work in him, a stern self-control. If his physical fires seemed dimmed, perhaps it was because they had been directed to the service of a bright hot flame of mental will and purpose. He meant to succeed here, in this cold and alien place, no matter what it cost him. His dark, golden-brown eyes met the president’s pale gaze without faltering.

  “Your age?”

  “I have seen sixteen sum
mers.”

  Chauncy put a hand to his brow, as if a sudden pain stabbed him. He shook his silver head, frowning. “No, no, no. You should have rid yourself of these barbarian expressions long since. You are sixteen years old. Fashion it thus.” He turned to his clerk and muttered under his breath: “A salvage, still, in the vulgate tongue, and yet Corlett wants me to believe him fitted for high study of the classics….” He gave a great sigh that turned into a yawn, which he did not trouble to conceal. He riffled through the pages on his desk and pulled out a sheet, looked it over perfunctorily and handed it across the desk to Caleb.

  “Here is a page of English sentences. Give them me in Latin … suo ut aiunt marte.”

  Caleb pushed his lexicon to the side of the table as the president had instructed. Chauncy raised an eyebrow, as if surprised that Caleb had understood even that little shard of Latin. I saw Caleb’s face lighten as he scanned the page that Chauncy had given him. Then he bent his head and his hand moved fluidly across the parchment. I raised myself up onto my toes so that I could look over his work. He had developed a fine hand, elegant, yet legible even to me, who struggled to read most men’s script. I soon saw why he had smiled. I could make out that the sentences were from a passage he knew well, on Caesar’s crossing the Rhine. It was one he had studied with father, thoroughly, long since.

  Caleb passed back the completed page. Chauncy pursed his lips and tilted the paper in the direction of the clerk. “He writes a fair hand—I will say that much.” Then he brought it close and began to read over the lines. His mouth slackened a little as his eyes traveled down the page. “I see but one error—here.” He struck out the offending verb and scrawled a correction. “Most surprising. Most unexpected … My brother Corlett did say, but I thought him wishful and deluded.” The clerk nodded agreement. Chauncy looked at Caleb more searchingly. “Be so good as to give me the several terminations of the futures in the different conjugations?”

  Caleb answered without hesitation. Chauncy then embarked upon an interrogation in Latin that was, most of it, too swift for me to follow, unpracticed as I had become. Occasionally, Chauncy had to repeat a question, and from time to time he raised a hand to halt Caleb’s answer and to correct an error, but then the exchange would resume. As the conversation continued, Chauncy began to lean forward in his chair, increasing the difficulty of his questions.

  “So,” said Chauncy, switching back to English at last. “It seems your Latin is grounded solidly. You are on the way to mastery of correct speaking. At this college, we go further. One of the seven arts we teach here is fine speaking. I assume you know the name we give to that study?”

  “Rhetoric,” answered Caleb.

  “So you have heard of it….”

  “Heard of it, and heard the thing itself, long before I knew that there was a name for it. Where I grew up, that man was prized who could deliver himself of a well-fashioned and persuasive speech.”

  Chauncy smiled indulgently. “Is that so? I think you will find, in the course of your studies here, that the best efforts of unlettered salvages ill compare…. Some half-clad pagan warrior, after all, could hardly be said to employ the rhetoric of Athens.”

  Caleb returned the president’s smile. “Yet they say that Homer was unlettered, and did he not give us Achilles, a half-clad pagan warrior, who was both ‘doer of deeds’ and ‘speaker of words’?”

  Chauncy sat back in his chair and peered at Caleb. Then he nodded approvingly. “Well argued. Indeed. And since I am now made aware that you have read Homer, let us turn to your Greek.”

  I tensed. Samuel had told me that the study of Greek was Chauncy’s great passion. He had lectured upon it at Trinity College in Cambridge, before a dispute as to whether or not a church erred that erected a communion rail for the service of the Lord’s Supper. He had been briefly imprisoned for his views—such were the desperate straits, for reform-minded persons, under Charles I. When he was released, he took ship for the Plimouth colony, to serve as minister there. Before long, he had fallen out with his flock upon another dispute, this one of more practical import. He had insisted on total immersion of infants at their baptism. The parents, rightfully fearing that this might not be so convenient for their babes in the chill of a frigid Plimouth winter, had refused to allow it. He had been about to take a passage back to England when Harvard’s overseers offered him the college presidency. There was to be one condition, since they had just rid themselves of the former president, Dunster, over his Anabaptist tendency: Chauncy would be required to keep his immersion ideas to himself. Since college presidents are not generally called upon to perform the baptisimal rite, he had managed, so far, to do so.

  “What cases do the verbs of admiring and despising govern?”

  “Genitive and dative.”

  “Well. Give me then the formation of the first and second aorists….”

  And so it went on, Chauncy nodding approvingly at each of Caleb’s assured responses.

  “I must say, my brother Corlett has fitted you for our college most soundly. Most soundly indeed. I must tell you that despite your master’s lofty claims, I had my doubts that one from your … station … could readily join this particular freshman class. You will study here beside the scions of some of our most distinguished families. We have already admitted in your year Benjamin Eliot, the youngest son of our beloved apostle, and another youngest, Joseph Dudley, son of our late governor—but you already are acquainted with Dudley from Corlett’s school, of course—and then there is Edward Mitchelson, son of the marshal, and Hope Atherton, whose father is a major general…. Liberi liberaliter educati. I suppose I must assume now that you know what that means?”

  “Gentlemen, educated like gentlemen,” Caleb replied.

  “Very good. It remains to be seen if such stuff as you can be fashioned into a gentleman….”

  “Hic labor, hoc opus est.”

  I felt the blood beat in my head and wondered at Caleb’s composure. His face, as he had said this last, was a picture of sincerity. But something in the tone of his voice told me he was playing with the pompous president. Sitting there erect, in the grace of his natural bearing, Caleb looked more the gentleman than the lardy, stoop-shouldered old Chauncy, with his dingy collar and threadbare, rumpled gown. I had not met the college laundress, but it came to me that she could benefit from some instruction in the use of a bluing wash and a flat iron. Samuel Corlett had told me that Charles Chauncy was, in fact, a gentleman born, from an ancient landed family in Hertfordshire. He had finished near the head of his class in both degrees at the Trinity College in Cambridge. But you would not guess these things by looking at him.

  The old man’s mottled hand trembled as he held out a parchment. “I give you here a signed copy of my admitatur, and a copy, in Latin, of course, of the laws of the college. Your first work of scholarship in this place is to transcribe these. Keep your copy by you always, and refer to it often. The steward will help you fetch your things across to the Indian College, and will fit you up with a gown and bonnet. Take care that you wear the bonnet to your first commons.” He turned to the clerk. “The junior sophisters will have their sport with the freshmen, and send them in uncovered.” He glanced back at Caleb. “Do not let them persuade you. Only those sit bareheaded at board who are in disgrace and under punishment. I hope never to see you so, if indeed you can raise yourself up to the opportunities and responsibilities that you now assume.”

  Caleb stood, gave a slight bow, and turned. Chauncy raised a hand. “A moment, if you please. I should say, lest you be in any doubt, that we are glad to have you here. I am sure there will be difficulties, small and large, as you go forward. But you must not think you are unwelcome. Truly, you are more than welcome. You are necessary. I had begun to think this day would never come. I rejoice in it—it will give satisfaction to our honored benefactors in London. Now send in the other salv—the other lad, and we will know if he is as well fitted as you are.”

  As Caleb turned, he
saw me, standing against the wall. He glanced down at the admitatur in his hand, and we exchanged a smile of triumph. Chauncy caught the looks passing between us. His brow creased with displeasure. “You. You are dismissed.” I nodded obediently and withdrew, regretting that I would not be able to witness Joel’s examination and see how he did. I passed by him, waiting in the hall. Caleb and I murmured words of encouragement. He was dressed as fine and plain as Caleb—I had seen to it—but he lacked his older friend’s composure. His usual dreamy gaze was gone, replaced with the desperate look of a beast at bay, and his skin was misted all over with sweat. As he rose to enter the hall, I could see that his hands trembled. Suddenly, he looked very young. Caleb placed a hand on his shoulder, and whispered to him. I could not hear the words, but I know they were Wampanaontoaonk.

  Perhaps Joel was one of those who require an agitation of spirit to elevate his abilities. I heard later that he acquitted himself even more nobly than Caleb.

  XXIII

  If I had thought to find a more ample providence at the college than we had enjoyed at Master Corlett’s school, the steward’s complaining, as he tallied up the tuition payments, soon set me to rights on that score. The college was kept all year, without closure or recess, but the main part of the fees was paid in early fall, when the freshman class entered.

  “Short commons again, this leaf fall, by the looks of what’s acoming in.” Roger Whitby was a masty Yorkshireman, florid of face, with an easy temper, quick to laughter. I soon learned that his chief amusement was to prick the self-important manners of the tutors and their charges. “If these lads be the sons of the prophets, then they sires ought to seek out another line of work, one that yields up better wages.”

  I had been tasked to help him sort and store the various goods in which families paid their college bills. When he learned I could count, he set me to tally sacks of Indian corn and rye that had just come off a dray. He looked over my reckoning—“Brussen lass, who can cipher, and knows her letters; the last lass could do none of that, willing worker though she was; I’ll speak no ill of her. I see here it’s two to one, corn to rye, coming in this term. That’s as well. Wife says thee can make a good brown bread so. Some years, it’s all corn we get, and then the pones might as well be made on sawdust, since we’ve nary enough eggs to bind ’em.” I took note of that: perhaps establishing a henhouse would be a project I could undertake to better the lot of the scholars.