Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

  Fair winds and foul. Barks and sloops. Schooners and gigs. Waters, wild and wide, shallow and still. How these things have marked out the chapters of my life. I suppose an island dweller should expect it to be so.

  V

  The boat that brought me home to the island from Cambridge, in June of 1665, was a tired, oakum-patched old lugger, but to me it seemed a blessed craft.

  The weather was fair and sparkling. I stood on the foredeck, gripping the stays, yearning to catch the very first sight of the island I had left so reluctantly five years since. Joel was beside me, his own longing even more urgent than my own. My heart flipped in my chest when his keen eyes descried the line in the distance that marked the island. That line soon became a nub, then a vivid cliff, then the vast sweep of beloved shore where I had spent the sweetest days of my girlhood. I cried out to Samuel, who was holding Ammi Ruhama in his arms. He looked up and saw the distant island rising out of the breakers. He smiled with affection in his eyes, happy for me in my joy.

  We disembarked to a large welcoming party—grandfather, barely touched by age; Aunt Hannah, frail and wrinkled as a raisin, hobbling with the support of a brace of grandsons. Makepeace, sleek as a hearth cat, his young stepson holding fast to his hand and his wife, Dorcas, at his side, cradling the infant daughter they had named for Solace. A little behind this first press of greeters stood Iacoomis and his wife and all their children, a well-grown, prosperous-looking brood. In the midst of my own family, I looked across at Joel’s, smiling to see how the children swarmed all around him, the littlest vying to clamber into his arms, the older ones laying a hand on his back or shoulder, all eager to touch the Harvard laureate on his homecoming. His mother, Grace, circled his slender wrist with her own fleshy hand and clicked her tongue in disapproval at his winnowed condition. There was little sign of the plump boy who had left this place. I could tell she resolved, then and there, to fatten him up in the coming weeks.

  I thought of Caleb. There was no one to tend to him in such a manner. With heavy heart, he had determined to stay in Cambridge, even though those who had sat solstices were at liberty for the several weeks until commencement. His only close kinsman, Tequamuck, could not be expected to greet with any cheer his lost apprentice, adopted now into the highest tier of English society. I do not know if Caleb feared his uncle, or, from lingering affection, sought not to confront him with his loss. I do know that this uncommon separation from his friend, and at such a time of celebration, cost both of them a great deal. I also know that Joel had not pressed Caleb to come, understanding better than any other the rend in the fabric of his friend’s life.

  Now, even as Joel laughed and said kind words to his own kinfolk, I could see his eyes scanning the dock. I supposed he looked for Anne. Their reunion came later, when the Merry family fetched her to the plantation that afternoon. Grandfather presided over their marriage the eve of the following day. Anne had fulfilled her early promise of beauty, her green eyes no longer downcast but flashing, animated at last by a confident and joyous spirit. Joel’s dreamy brown gaze rarely left her face. The feasting was prodigious. I would say a good half of the Takemmy band, including the sonquem, came to Great Harbor to join the celebration, bringing with them the pick of their best victuals to add to Iacoomis’s ample providence. Only the Aldens and their faction held aloof, though even some one or two of their confederates joined in, once the gaiety of the celebration became apparent.

  In the cool of that morning, I had left Samuel to tend to Ammi Ruhama. I went to find Speckle. She looked well for her years, glossy and well cared for. When I threw the bridle over her head, she nuzzled me and did a little dance, anticipating our ride. I did not press her but went slowly, noting the changes the years had brought. These were very great in the lands abutting the settlement. The wilderness of my childhood that had pressed so close upon us had been pushed back, year following year. There were some miles of clear trail cut now, leading out of Great Harbor. Stumps marked out woodlots farther afield, as settlers were obliged to travel greater distances to secure their fuel. Many acres more had been improved for pasture, so that the flocks that grazed now were much enlarged.

  I was glad when we came at last to unspoiled, shady groves of tall beech and fragrant sassafras. I breathed greedily the scents of my childhood, watching the familiar play of light through the leaves. I sat for a long time at father’s white stone cairn, risen now to twice my own height and sparkling in the sunshine. When we reached the south shore, Speckle broke into a canter of her own accord, and I let her run through the surf until she tired.

  In the days that followed, I rode out whenever I could—alone, sometimes; often with Samuel and the babe. I wanted to share my memories insofar as I was able. But some things I did not share, and if at times Samuel caught me, lost in reverie, he did not press me to reveal my every thought.

  I think it would have been impossible to find the heart to leave the island, as the summer waxed and the harvest ripened, had we not had the great celebration of Caleb and Joel’s commencement calling us back to Cambridge. We had conceived what I thought was a marvelous scheme to enlarge Joel’s joy in the day. He had need to return ahead of us, since if he learned he had indeed been honored as valedictorian, he would have to work upon an oration and rehearse his leading role in the many rituals of the day. There was a bark all set to sail on the first favorable tide, laden to the gunwales with island produce—fulled fleeces, barrels of salt cod, bales of sassafras root bound for England, where it was prized as a remedy for the evils of the French pox. The captain had agreed to take Joel as passenger. We said we would see him in Cambridge within the fortnight. We planned in secret to bring Iacoomis, as a surprise.

  Anne and I together went to the pier to say farewell. I hung back, to give them a private moment. They stood, heads together, the sunlight gleaming on their sleek black hair, and when Joel went aboard and the sails bellied and stiffened in the fresh breeze, she stayed on the dock, looking after him, until the boat passed around the curve of land and out of sight. Later, when I tried to peer through my grief for any hint of a thing awry, I think that I sensed that the bark sat low in the water. But perhaps that memory is not a true one, just a thought planted in my mind, in the aftermath.

  VI

  It strikes me now that I have written so little in my various scrawls throughout the years about our sister island, that low crescent, farther out to sea, over the blue horizon beyond the little isle of Chappaquiddick. That grandfather’s patent included the other island, I had always known; I recalled his satisfaction in 1659 when he found investors in Salisbury who paid him thirty pounds and two beaver hats—of which he was rather vain—for an interest in it. I also knew that father went there from time to time, with Iacoomis, to evangelize the Indians of that place. But his reports, when he would return, made it out in every way inferior to our own island—smaller, flatter, less various, more windswept—and barely worth braving the treacherous few miles of rock-strewn shoal.

  Yet it was thence we went, three days after Joel’s departure, my tears lashed from my face by the salt-laden wind and my guts knotted up with sorrow and seasickness, both. There had been high winds, the afternoon of Joel’s departure, but not so heavy as to cause any of us great concern. Ships plied the route from the island to Boston in much worse conditions, the mariners thinking little of it. How that bark came to be pushed so far off course and to ground itself on Coatuet, no one has ever been able to explain.

  As we approached the island, we saw the bark, lying aslant, washed high up on the sands of the barrier beach just short of a dense cypress forest. It was in no sense a shipwrack, the bark so little damaged it seemed impossible that any aboard could have perished in the grounding. I turned to Samuel, my face lit with hope that the reports which had reached us were false. But he looked down upon me with a sad gravity, laid his hand about my shoulder and shook his head. I realized then that he knew more of this matter than he had yet confided to me.

  The
skipper of our vessel would not risk a closer approach, so we beat on for the harbor, reefing our sails and tacking slowly up to the dock. Peter Folger met us there, and the four of us—Samuel, the baby, Iacoomis and myself—disembarked and walked the short track to his cottage. Iacoomis was hunched over like an old man, wearing a beaten expression that I had not seen upon him since first he came to our home in my childhood days.

  Folger had bread, cheese and beer set out upon the board, and I took a heel of the bread, thinking to quiet my belly, but the crumbs sat like ashes in my mouth and I had to set it by directly. Iacoomis was the first to speak. He addressed Folger in Wampanaontoaonk.

  “Where is the body of my son?”

  “Friend,” Folger replied gravely. “Carry the memory of your son alive.”

  Iacoomis looked at Folger, his eyes akindle. “I will see my son.”

  Folger put a hand on his shoulder. “My friend, it shall be as you wish. As you wish. But I would spare you. They were several. They used warclubs. Their frenzy was very great.”

  I cried out at this, and Iacoomis, who had forged himself into the bravest man I knew, the man who had confronted the pawaaws and put them under his heel, folded in upon himself like a dying leaf and struggled to breathe.

  Samuel, who did not understand what had been said, wrapped me in his arms and looked questioningly at Folger.

  “We have the murtherers, rest easy on that score. They will hang, be assured of it. They are known to us: wicked troublemakers who for some time now have complained that we choused them from their hunting grounds and let our hogs despoil their clam beds. ’Tis a false claim, for we have the mark of their sonquem on the papers that ceded all their lands to us. They say he did not know what he signed, but how is it a fault in us if they cannot now, as they claim, feed their children? In any case, this was not the first time they turned to theft—for that was their motive, they have confessed it. Seeing the bark run aground they swarmed it, for lucre of the spoil within, and beat any who tried to gainsay them. The first mate, who yet lived when we found him—by God’s stern providence, he died thereafter—gave us to understand that Joel confronted them most bravely, making arguments in their own tongue as to why they should forbear, but this only enraged them more against him, seemingly, and at the last all of them together set upon him most cruelly.”

  When I could speak, I turned to Iacoomis and told him, in Wampanaontoaonk, that it would be my very great honor to be permitted to wash Joel’s body and prepare it for Christian burial. Iacoomis would want no other rites for his son.

  Samuel tried to turn me from the task. But I looked into his eyes and said I would do it, and it was a measure of how we had become, as a couple, that he simply took Ammi Ruhama from my arms and nodded as I left for the place where they had laid out Joel’s shattered corpse. Peter Folger gave me linens from his own store to dress the body. I did my best. Even so, when Iacoomis came to see his son, it was a measure of his courage and his Christian conviction that he was able to refrain from crying out at the sight of him. Thus perished from this world our hopeful young prophet Joel.

  We returned with Iacoomis to our island with the heavy tidings that the reports and rumors of wrack and death were true. I was present when Anne learned the news. She wailed and tore at her face and hair, and could not be comforted. I sat up with her that night, and left her the next day in the care of Grace Iacoomis, sitting by their door, her green eyes like brimming pools, staring sightlessly out to sea.

  Two days later, Samuel and I disembarked at the Cambridge town landing into a scene of celebration all at odds with our melancholy state. Since the first commencement in 1642, the revels are become the chief summer festival of Cambridge, arriving as they do hand in hand with the earliest of the harvest-time bounty and before the first hint of hardening weather. Since the college’s founding even the most sober members of this austere colony have thought learning worthy of celebration, and have sanctioned excesses at commencement that would draw stern punishment on other days. That year was no different, and as always, Cambridge was filling up as the day approached with folk associated with the college and those who came for the festival alone.

  I left Samuel and the babe at the Cutters’ house and walked directly to the Indian College. It fell to me to carry the news to Caleb. I was his friend: it was right that I should do it. Samuel wanted to go with me, but I said no. Howsoever my friend received this blow, the fewer witnesses the better, as I thought. The worst of it was that his face was all joy when first he caught sight of me. He hurried out into the yard to greet me. He looked as well as I had seen him since my return from Padua, all alight with anticipation of the celebration to come.

  I had thought, all through the journey, of what words I could say to him. I had turned and shaped them and spoken them in my mind many times. In the end, all my rehearsals were for nowt. Where one loves another as greatly as Caleb loved Joel, the soul does not need words to bring fell tidings. My face, my body, the heaviness of my step—all these things carried the news to him plain. Before any word passed my lips—“shipwrack” or “murther”—Caleb knew Joel was dead.

  He did not cry out. He stood, and the hand that had been extended to greet me fell heavy to his side. His face twitched from the effort of self-control. I was struggling to form words, my throat closed by my own tears. I do not know what I managed to choke out in regard to the events, but after a moment he raised a hand and hushed me.

  “Bethia.” He took a deep, ragged breath. “I will trouble you to hear this anon. Please leave me now.”

  “Caleb, if I—”

  “Please, Bethia. As you care for me. Go.”

  So I went. I do not know if he sought the details, some later time, from Samuel or any other. But to me he never spoke of Joel’s death again.

  VII

  I will not say the Harvard commencement of the Year of Our Lord 1665 was joyless. That would be false. There was joy, a moment of sweet festivity, even for those of us who mourned. In this fallen world, such is our condition. Every happiness is a bright ray between shadows, every gaiety bracketed by grief. There is no birth that does not recall a death, no victory but brings to mind a defeat. So was that commencement a celebration. I believe Joel wanted it so. His spirit, insofar as I felt its light touch that day, was no unquiet ghost but a warm and benign companion. I think—I hope—that Caleb felt this too.

  I close my eyes, and I remember that sun-dappled day. The paths were crowded from early morning with visitors from Boston, Watertown, Charlestown and every outlying farm or plantation. Families of the commencers jostled jib by jole with Indians, farmers, clergymen, and vendors loudly hawking their diverse wares, come to profit off the throng. It seemed that many folk thirsted not for learning but for beer and wine, for the taverns did brisk business, and public drunkenness was evident in some raucous antics among the crowd.

  When I had worked in the buttery, the preparations for the feasting and bevering had consumed us for many weeks prior to the day itself. By long custom we engaged two Indians from Natick who were adept at the turnspit to roast beeves, and in the great fireplace all manner of kettles brimmed with pottages and puddings. We had rolled out no less than twelve barrels of wine that year, and I lost count of the amount of cider and beer that was also consumed, and that just within the college precinct. I had thought the fest ill-named that year, for this inceptio, or beginning, seemed more apt to be the end of those of us tasked to provision it.

  Samuel and I were abroad early, to assure a good vantage point for the academical procession. Even so, many had come before us. I could see the governor, mounted and flanked by his pike-bearing guards, and also the sheriffs providing escort to the Board of Overseers. But the honorable members of the Great and General Court and the reverend clergy of the six leading towns I could not see, since they were on foot. I tugged on Samuel’s hand and we wove our way, with some difficulty in that dense throng, until we found a higher vantage point. I was determined to see Caleb
marching with his classmates. I glimpsed Chauncy, and Dunster, the former president, in the ermine-trimmed robes and velvet bonnets of their English colleges. And then came our scholars in their plain gowns, their own glowing faces the only adornment they required. They were all grave looks one moment, joyful smiles the next when perhaps they caught the eye of a parent in the crowd. I saw Eliot and Dudley, handsome Hope Atherton and a smiling Jabez Fox. Then Caleb, marching last, taller than the next by a good half a head, stately in his bearing, as one raised to ceremony. He did not look all about him, as some of the others did, but kept his eyes ahead, his gaze intense and focused, as if he truly could see the future towards which he walked.

  I could not peel my eyes from him, even as he walked on and past me. The set of his shoulders, the ceremonial cap squarely upon his head—and I thought of turkey feathers and raccoon grease, purple wampum and deer hide. I thought of the hands, dirt engrained, reaching so avidly for the book I held. I had begun this journey following him into the hidden corners of his world and here it ended with him crossed over into the brightest heights of mine.

  Samuel touched my arm then and signaled that we needed to make haste into the hall. I had arranged with the Whitbys to spy upon the ceremony from the buttery and had promised to stay well out of their way on this, the busiest day of their year. From my peephole I saw Samuel take his place at the front with the distinguished alumni. The hall was crowded and all abuzz with excited chatter until the minister stood to deliver his invocation. Then Benjamin Eliot was called forth to deliver the Greek oration. He had been named valedictorian. Nothing was said about Joel’s untimely and tragic death, and if the honor would have gone to him, no sign of it was given. I do not know why they did not acknowledge him; it seemed to me then a grave misjudgment, so much so that I felt my face burn hot with the injustice of the omission. Surely, had such a tragic fate overtaken an Eliot or a Dudley, we should have heard of it, and offered up a prayer. I expect Chauncy did not wish to darken the merriment of the day, or to belittle young Eliot by making it plain that he was a second choice. Especially since his renowned father sat smiling proudly in the first tier of distinguished guests. Still, it sat ill with me, and it does so even to this day.