Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

  I found Makepeace much changed—lighter in his looks and altogether less stern in his manner. I set this down to the fact that he no longer was required to scale the mount of academe each day and face his own insufficiencies. Instead, he worked the farm and read his Bible and was minister to the settlement in all important ways. Although he was not qualified to be ordained, most island folk were happy to have him take father’s place upon the pulpit, where he preached a plain and unadorned gospel.

  The need had been great for some other who spoke Wampanaontoaonk to help Iacoomis and grandfather continue father’s missionary works, Makepeace being disinclined and ill-fitted to make any headway in that difficult tongue. Peter Folger, grandfather’s agent, was persuaded to take the post. He had removed himself to our sister island some years since, after falling out with grandfather on a difference regarding the thorny issue of baptism. But somehow the thorns were clipped, and he returned, so that father’s work of catechizing and teaching school in Manitouwatootan continued in due season.

  The reason for Makepeace’s softened manner had another ground beyond his satisfaction at being liberated from arduous studies. This became patent when he confided that he was to be married soon himself, to the widow Gaze. I knew her only slightly as a quiet, devout, older woman, two years senior to Makepeace. Her short marriage to the mariner Eliahu Gaze had left her with an infant son. As Makepeace waxed on about this babe, it became clear that he doted on the child and the mother in equal parts. I wished them joy with all my heart, and all the more so because Dorcas Gaze’s widow’s thirds had come to a tidy estate. Makepeace, showing himself fair and principled to a high degree, was most liberal in figuring my marriage portion, allowing me a larger share than I had expected.

  This mattered more than it might have done. Quite unlooked for, Samuel had been furnished with the means to realize his long desire: he had been offered a place in the chirurgical school at the University of Padua, along with a modest bursary towards his expenses. With certain shifts and dispositions, we calculated that we were just in purse to accept the offer. So we set sail in December. I took leave of Joel and Caleb with few misgivings: they seemed well embarked upon their sophomore year, and well set, both in their studies and in their place as members in good standing of the college community. With the president himself so invested in their success, the fact of it seemed to me to be assured.

  It was a long journey, and difficult. But on a winter morning, wreathed in mists, a muscular boatman poled our craft across a milky lagoon. He spoke neither English nor Latin, but when he raised his arm and pointed, I could descry, in the distance, a squiggly horizon. At first, my mind could not reason out what my eyes beheld. When I had looked out from water towards land, it had generally been toward wooded bluffs or lightly settled harbors. Then suddenly I knew what I saw: a horizon entirely fashioned by the hand of man. And such a horizon: the spires and cupolas of Venice, luminous in the pale sun. We stepped ashore near St. Marco’s plaza, just as that great square erupted with noise. It was noon, and the bells of a hundred churches were pealing. The sound seemed to rise up everywhere around us. It was as if the very stones were singing.

  For a girl raised on the rim of a wilderness, it was strange to be in a place where every inch of ground had been settled for hundreds upon hundreds of years. I felt the press of people, and the press of ghosts—great hordes of those who had lived and walked before me. That time in the Old World—its different light, strange scents, foreign sounds—comes back to me now in bright memories: a summer day in Padua. Samuel returns from the Anatomy Theater. The words tumble from him as he tells me all he has learned that morning, of the circulation of the blood through ropey artery and slender vein. We sit in the courtyard as the hot sun beats down on the crumbling roseate walls and the fragrance of lavender rises from the herb pots. There are bees, their legs heavy with pollen, fumbling the tiny blooms. I tear a chunk of good bread and smear ripe cheese upon it. I take up a tiny piece of nobbly root. The landlord had handed it to me that morning with great ceremony, as if it were a gemstone. I grate it, as he has shown me, atop the oozing cheese. There is a sudden wonderful aroma—strange, rich, earthy. I feed the luscious bread to Samuel as if he were a child. We laugh, and he takes my hand and draws me inside, to lie upon the cool sheets in our shuttered chamber.

  We were two years in Padua. In the mornings, while Samuel attended the Anatomy Theater, I earned a good coin teaching English to a pair of charming little contessas and their boisterous younger brother. They were papists, of course. In that city, whose university has been famous for four hundred years, we lived cheek by jowl with all manner of outlandish persons who had been drawn to study there—wandering Jews, dark-skinned Musalmans, tonsured monks in roped-belted robes. On Fridays, at sunset, we would hear the haunting Hebrew melodies drift from the nearby synagogue and see the men issue hence in their striped silk coats and flat fur hats. On feast days we would marvel at the processions of the papists, carrying their gilded, flower-bedecked statues through the streets. In time, even Samuel came to wonder if our austere form of worship was the only one way to be godly.

  We returned to Cambridge in 1664. Samuel’s father beckoned us home. His strength was failing and he required his son to keep the school until a suitable master could be established in his place. I was ill all the voyage. We docked in Boston harbor in a driving rain and I wanted to kneel in the mud and kiss the ground—not because Boston was dear to me, but because it was ground—terra firma—and not a roiling ocean. The next morning, I was ill again. Samuel looked at me strangely, and asked the question that I should have asked myself, weeks since, had I not been too ill to think clearly. We had, after more than two years, begun to resign ourselves to the possibility that God would not bless us with issue. But that day I realized that I carried our child. I will not write of the birth, except to say that I barely survived it. He would be our only child, for though Samuel and the midwife together saved my life, they gave me to understand there would be no other. So we chose the name from the bible verse: Call your son ammi (my people) and your daughter ruhama (beloved), because this child would be both son and daughter to us. And so he has proved: a strong man, yet a tender one. He lives with us now—or perhaps I should say, we with him—for even though Samuel still has vigor and answers occasional calls for his chirurgical skills, it is Ammi Ruhama and his Elizabeth who order the life of this household now. They have made it a haven for all of us, frail elderly and boisterous grandbabes alike.

  But I run ahead of myself. I was not long risen from my troubled childbed, and Ammi Ruhama was an infant in my arms on the warm June morning in 1665 when we entered the college hall to hear Caleb and Joel, at the end of their senior year, sit solstices with their classmates. For six days, the candidates for graduation were required to be in the hall until the dinner hour, ready to match wits with any who held a master’s degree, or with such members of the college’s Board of Overseers who cared to quiz them. One by one, the good and the great men of the colony came, as they did every year at that time, to try the knowledge of the graduating class.

  Caleb’s looks troubled me. He had become rail thin. A persistent cough wracked him. In the years of my absence he had grown out of his health by reason of poor diet and too close an application to his studies. Yet his face was handsome, still, in a drawn and spare way, and as he argued in Latin with one of the college overseers I noted that it lost its haggard cast. Even though he had far surpassed my skills in that tongue, I knew enough to judge that he spoke with eloquence, buttressing his argument with useful epigrams and citations from Ramus and Aristotle. His own gifts were the ore, and now that ore had been refined and forged by years of effort under the preeminent scholar in the colony.

  As impressive as Caleb’s disputations seemed to me, the whispers about the hall that day concerned Joel. The rumor was that come commencement, Joel would be named valedictorian of his class, ranked above the scions of Eliot and Dudley and all the other highborn En
glish scholars. I flushed with pleasure to hear this: I could imagine his aged father, who had risen up from spurned outcast, watching his son lead the class to commencement. I resolved to see to it that plans were made to fetch him hence from the island when the time came.

  I had been made aware, on my return to Cambridge, that Caleb’s future also was assured. He had become protégé of Thomas Danforth, the esteemed magistrate and assistant to the governor. As treasurer of Harvard, Danforth had been much about the college and had noticed Caleb, encouraging him in his studies and speaking often with him about issues in law, such as natural and chartered rights. Caleb was to go to live in his house at Charlestown, directly from Harvard, and study the law under his inspection. I rejoiced to learn this, and felt sure his health would mend itself once he was free of the privations and restrictions of college life.

  I was even more convinced of this when Samuel and I dined with Thomas Danforth and shared his ample board, soon after our return from Padua. Danforth had heard that I had been acquainted with Caleb from his early youth, and he plied me with questions about the style of life for native peoples on the island, and about Caleb’s family, the role of his father the sonquem, and how it might be like or different to the role of our English lawgivers.

  He was most interested when I told him what I knew of how my father had first negotiated for land. The sonquem at the time thought the sale a good thing, but not all of his band had agreed with him. Instead of proceeding as an English Lord would do, disregarding his subjects, the sonquem had ceded some territory to the dissenters and sold to us only from his own remnant holdings. Danforth found this idea of government most arresting. Through the entire meal, he cried up Caleb’s abilities, saying there was nothing he might not do, given time and chance. It gave me such joy to hear him talk of his high ambitions for my friend, whom he already cast as a coming man of affairs. He speculated that we would see Caleb one day take his place upon the bench of justice, representing the native peoples in the colony’s good governance.

  Joel, for his part, told me that he was resolved to follow his father in the ministry. He planned to return to the island to see how his people stood in regard to their spiritual estate, and how he might further his father’s work of bringing them to Christ. He hoped, if funds were forthcoming from the society, to pursue a second degree, and become ordained. During the sitting of solstices, he drew us apart. Diffidently, his eyes upon the ground, he asked if Samuel and I would travel with him to the island before the summer’s commencement exercises, to witness his marriage to Anne. It seemed the two young people had corresponded through the years, in secret from all save Caleb, ever since her clandestine escape from Cambridge. They had been handfast for a year and were impatient for the sanctification of their union.

  Samuel and I each congratulated him most sincerely, and when I looked a question at Samuel he said he was sure he could arrange a tutor for the school so that we could make the voyage. I grasped his hand when he said this, and gave him a look which I hoped conveyed my full heart. I had not seen the island in five years, and I longed for it. Joel seemed pleased, and went to sit again in his place, which was, as ever, beside Caleb.

  He was soon engrossed in a disputation with an elderly divine, but all the while, apparently, managing to lend an ear to Caleb’s argument as well. At one point, he turned and offered Caleb a point of logic to use against his opponent. It was a witty point, and all who heard it laughed in appreciation.

  At that moment, Ammi Ruhama started a thin, catlike mewling, which I knew from experience would soon turn to a piercing howl if I did not attend to his needs. So I took my leave of Samuel and walked back to the pleasant, light-filled room we had rented in the home of his cousin the glazier, Ephriam Cutter. As I sat by the open casement, feeling the warm summer air caress my breast and lift my babe’s silken hair, I felt a drowsy kind of satisfaction. I thought of my father, and how he would have rejoiced to see Caleb and Joel embarked upon such useful and distinguished lives. I thought of Anne, and how that decision, made in the heat of such roiling emotion so many years earlier, had led to such a happy result. I let my fingers play with the soft dark strands of Ammi Ruhama’s hair. He was his father’s son, though he had some look of my twin brother Zuriel about him, or so I liked to think. I leaned my head down and whispered in his ear: “Soon, very soon, little one, we will make the crossing, home to my island. You will like it there.”

  IV

  I was right about that, at least. Ammi Ruhama loves this island. He was ten years old when we came back here to live, seeking refuge from the dreadful events that then beset the mainland. All through that terrible year of 1675, we would climb the bluffs and look across to the far shore, scanning the distant horizon for rumors of war. Too often, we could descry smoke rising from the latest embattled settlement.

  At first, it seemed as if Metacom’s rebellious Indians might well prevail. The frontier townships fell, one following the other. The fighting reached even unto Plimouth, where Metacom’s father Massasoit had once been a friend to the settlers. News drifted across the water of nightmarish acts: heads on pikes, disemboweled cattle, families burnt alive. Farmers could not bring in the harvest that year unless they assembled in large armed bands to do so. Folk fled frontier villages such as Northfield and Deerfield for the comparative safety of larger towns, but twelve settlements in all, including Providence, were burned and destroyed. It seemed that the English did not know how to fight these foes, who appeared unafraid of death, and who knew their native ground so well that they could melt invisibly into swamp or fen to evade pursuit.

  We tried to keep the worst of this from Ammi Ruhama, but Samuel and I held each other at night and prayed that the war would not reach out to us. Our prayer was answered; the native people of this island never did side with Metacom, or King Philip, as the English styled him. Instead, grandfather put his trust in them, and armed them to defend themselves, and us, should any of Metacom’s followers attempt to bring the war across the sound.

  For half a year things went ill for the mainland English. Indeed, if the Indians had united behind Metacom, and sunk old tribal enmities, I do believe they would have prevailed, and undone the colonial enterprise on these shores for a generation or more. As it was, the costs were very great. Over six hundred English were killed and the number of Indian deaths much higher. Also dead: the slender hope that our two peoples might live together in any kind of amity.

  By the time the fortunes of war reversed themselves—Metacom executed, his followers killed or sold into foreign slavery—Ammi Ruhama had a great dread of the mainland, and begged that we stay upon the island. He had set down his roots, deep into its rich soils, and has never since desired to be in any other place. As it happened, his fear of the world across the water proved well founded, for the end of the war brought the colony no respite from disaster. Every boat that plied hence seemed to bring some news of woe. God’s hand lay heavily on his people, and no amount of fast days or prayerful reflection seemed to appease his wrath. Terrible fires scorched the homes and warehouses of Boston in ’75 and again in ’79, and in between, a smallpox epidemic raged so hot that some thirty English persons a day were laid in their graves by it. The winter of 1680 was bitter cold; the following summer brought shriveling drought. We felt this here, but not with the same battering force as they did upon the mainland. They say the clemency of the ocean’s currents moderated the extreme weathers, and kept from us the worst of it.

  Even though the news from the mainland continued so bleak, I was surprised that Samuel consented full willingly to stay on the island; I had thought he would yearn too greatly for the society of educated men. But there was no other chirurgeon here, and he deemed he could be of use. So, in time, we built this house. We have lived with great contentment within these walls, and seen those walls expand; a wing added for Ammi Ruhama’s family, and now two of his sons have their own cottages nearby. Sometimes, four generations gather here at board. At such times, I look
about me, amazed that such a restless girl should have grown old as matriarch to such a settled brood.

  While Ammi Ruhama was still very young, I tried to open up his eyes to the world beyond these shores. I would tell him of Padua, where he was conceived—of the city squares and the soaring towers, or the stirring tales from the opera at the great theater there. He would sit with his head on my knee and listen until I had done. Then he would turn his face to me—the face that had his father’s dark gravity, even at that young age, but also an elegance that Samuel’s ruined profile had obscured.

  “Those places,” he would say. “Everything there is done and built and finished. I like it here, where we can make and do for ourselves.” Although his father and I saw to it that he was an educated boy, he never cared for book learning as we did, and would not hear of leaving the island to attend the college. He grew into a practical man, who liked to use his hands as well as his wits. In this, my friend Noah Merry was like a second father to him, sharing with him the skills that belong to such a man. Noah and Tobia had been blessed with four daughters and no sons. When Ammi Ruhama wed their daughter Elizabeth, it was as if our two families truly became one.

  Ammi Ruhama prospered, which is well, since the fruitfulness not granted to Samuel and me has been his lot. (I can boast six living grandchildren and have lived to see three of my great-grandchildren.) Ammi Ruhama is a boatbuilder, and a renowned one. His genius was to study the age-old designs and see how he might adapt them for the particular conditions of our waters and the materials here ready to hand. The design of his craft has proved popular with coasters throughout the colony. One sees his boats often, plying along the shore, their distinctive rig unmistakable, even at a great distance. Whenever I glimpse such a vessel, I think to myself, “My son made that,” and I wish fair winds to those who sail it.