Caleb's Crossing (17 page)
His sermon that day was gentle in spirit, more like his preaching of old. He talked of the love of Christ and likened the bonds of affection between people with those between God and his faithful. That love, he said, endured, and was no less real and fervent, no matter that the parties did not see each other face-to-face. So it would be with the great love he bore them, he said. Although he would be gone from their sight across the seas through several moons, his love would be with them and they would be ever in his thoughts.
When it was time for him to mount up and go, it became clear that the men intended to follow him, on foot, all the long way to the hole in which a sloop lay that would bring him to Plimouth on the first stage of his voyage. And so we proceeded. I remember looking back over the mass of gleaming heads, traveling with one purpose through the trees, and being moved to tears that my father was so well beloved.
Makepeace, Caleb, Joel and his family, and grandfather, all were at the hole to make their last farewells to father. I saw their faces register amazement at the procession that swarmed the beach in our wake. We stood on the shore and waved as he took his place in the gig and oared out to where the sloop lay at anchor between the chops. It was only when the sails were set and the anchor weighed that I turned to go and saw Tequamuck, on the bluff above the hole, his feather cloak billowing in the summer breeze, his arms outstretched in an invocation. Although he was too far off for me to make out the words he chanted, I knew that they were not benign. Soon the Wampanoag on the beach saw him, too. They began murmuring among themselves. Some cried out against him in their own tongue. Others knelt in the sand and threw their hands up to heaven. But most of the crowd melted away faster than I would have thought possible for so large a gathering.
It took Makepeace a little time to register the cause of the sudden disarray, but once he knew its source he turned towards the bluff and cried out: “Cease your foul and clamorous noise! You offend the ears of the holy God! Cast yourself down upon the Earth before God and beg he would humble you!” The remaining Wampanoag were staring at Makepeace now with dismay upon their faces. Grandfather tugged at his sleeve and whispered urgently into his ear. I hoped that he was counseling what I felt—that a better course would be to ignore the wizard rather than give stature to his magic. Makepeace looked fierce, but he would not disobey grandfather. So they handed me up onto Speckle and we all turned for home. Tequamuck remained on the bluff, the sound of his chanting loud at our backs.
A fog rolled in that night, shreds of swirling mist that gathered and thickened and settled heavy on the island. We did not think anything of it; dense summer fogs are common enough here. Generally, the sun burns them off by mid-morning, and days that start so often are among the fairest. But by midday the fog had not lifted, and I moved through my chores in a cool veil of milky white, barely able to see the hand stretched out in front of me. The whole day passed so, the sunset a pale rumor on a pearly horizon.
That night, a light wind rose. Well, I thought: it shall blow the fogs away. But this wind was like no other we had ever had, and certainly not of a summer eve. In the dark of night it grew up into a fierce thing that howled and groaned. I woke to hear it driving sheets of rain in hard lashing blows against the house. I threw my cloak over my nightgown and went out with Makepeace into the wild dark. Speckle, hobbled in the dooryard, was white-eyed and haggering with cold. I held her head and spoke to her as Makepeace secured her blanket and tethered her securely beneath the eaves on the lee side of the house. Then we battled to close the outer shutters. The wind blew me flat against the shingles and I had to cling to them to remain upright. Makepeace had to give me his hand to bring me safe indoors. Even with all the shutters secured, still the house was shroudly shaken. The timbers complained under every thrashing blow and I feared that the roof beams might shiver. So strange was this wind in its unpredictable eddies that I could barely keep the fire lit. At times, the howling took on the form of human voices, keening in an unknown tongue. Other times it was a loud, rhythmic beating, like the bellows feeding Vulcan’s furnace. I heard more than one tree crack and split, and the crashing fall of mighty limbs. Every so often a gust would swirl down the chimney and scatter gray ash across the floor.
I looked at Makepeace, who was pale in the uncertain firelight.
“Do you think we ought to pray?”
“I do,” he said. And so we knelt together, side by side, and at the end of it, he reached for my hand.
The storm lasted through the following day, and only began to ease during the second night. At first light we walked out into a scarred world. The sea was pewter, and the wrack line stood high upon the strand, even to where the first low scrub oaks struggled for their spindly lives like aged and bent-backed crones. The branches of torn trees lay all about, as did ripped shingles and bundles of sodden thatch. There were other sights, most strange. A coracle had been lifted off the beach and blown atop the roof of our neighbor’s house, while a shutter of another dwelling had been torn away and impaled upon a pine bough. The fields were all of them ruined, as if reaped by a Bedlamite. Stalks had been hauled up out of the furrows, clods still clinging to the root. Our corn had come in early and been picked and cribbed, which was our good fortune. Those who had not yet harvested were left to glean what they could among the broken and disheveled plants.
While Makepeace gathered and replaced our torn shingles, I went to check on our tegs. As I expected, they were not in the open meadow, which was in the upland and exposed to the full force of the storm. As I walked the surrounding woods, searching for them, I wondered at what the storm had wrought. Full-grown trees were wound all around, as if they were mere withes of willow twig, very strange to behold. Nearby, a thicket of young maples had been pulled out of the soil entirely, the base of their tangled roots like a great disk set on end, affording an earthworm’s view of that world generally hidden beneath our feet. I reflected that the signs and marks of this storm would be written on this island for many years. Finally I came upon our sodden ewes. By God’s providence they had weathered the storm well enough, wedged all together in the lee of a pair of great boulders. None were missing. Other neighbors were not so lucky. Their flocks had scattered, and it was the work of several days to gather them. Some few were never found, a sore loss, their wool so valuable and the numbers here still so few. Makepeace and I busied ourselves lending a hand where it was needed, and were glad to be thus occupied. At dusk, we ate our bread in a pregnant silence, afraid to speak our minds.
Word that father’s ship had gone down came to us a fortnight later. It had broken up entirely. Scraps of wreckage had been sighted, so far off course that at first we fanned a hope that it was another unfortunate vessel, and that word would come to say father’s ship had weathered the storm in some safe harbor. But that slight candle of hope was snuffed soon enough. By chance the sloop’s figurehead was recovered among the jetsam, and that made identification certain.
Death by water is an abiding fear for an island-dwelling people. But to loose two souls so, father and Solace both, and in such short season, was a sore trial. Father gone down into the fathomless deep, and my Solace, poor tiny one, drowned in a mere puddle just paces from our door. Although father was a very precious man and the loss of him is very great to me, as it is to all honest folk who knew him, it is Solace’s death that is the harder for me to bear. All the world mourns father, whose labors God blessed while he lived. Many will remember him. Not so my Solace, who made no mark upon the world. Nights I can barely sleep for the loss of her weight against my body. In dark of night, I hear her cry, and start awake. But it is a voice of my dream only, and it wakes me to an aching loneliness. Now, all these months since her death, I think of her, and how she would have grown and changed. I see her walking beside me with a rolling gait, reaching out a plump hand to clasp my fingers. I see her hair lengthened and curling about her face. I imagine the sound of her voice as she says her first words, the small frown at her brow as she puzzles at something, a glimpse of her milk teeth as she smiles. It will be so, always. As the years pass, she will live and grow in my mind’s eye, from infancy through sweet girlhood, and when I am old I will see her still, coming herself into womanhood, her sky-blue eyes expressing a kindly wisdom, her laugh as she lifts up her own babe…
Yet all that time, she will lie in the ground, an infant always, her life ended just a little after the world had turned a full year. In my dreams, she comes to me. But always, in the end, frightfully. For I see her in her grave. Frail little finger bones, bleached white, curl around a crumbling parchment, a rotting peg doll, and a scatter of wampum beads fallen loose from a decaying shred of deer hide…
God is pleased to dispense himself variously. But while I fill up my mouth with prayers, they bring no comfort. My words rattle against each other like the last beech leaves on a winter branch, and though a hard wind scours the forest, it cannot free them from the bough; it will not lift them upward into the wide white sky.
I
n the days that followed the discovery of the wreck, the sea spewed up the bodies of several perished souls, casting them ashore in diverse coves upon the mainland. None of them was father’s. Although we felt ourselves orphans, we were not yet so: without a body, under the terms of the law, father could not be considered dead until the court ruled upon it. But whatever the letter of the law said, we and all the island knew that father was gone, and we did not wait for a magistrate’s permission to mourn him. Some very considerable persons marked his passing. The commissioners of the United Colonies referred to his loss, “which at present seemth to be almost irreparable.” The Apostle Eliot wrote a letter expressing his hope that the Lord would help us bear “this amazing blow, to take away my Brother Mayfield.”
His flock, too, mourned for its lost shepherd. I say “all the island,” for his death was not grieved in Great Harbor only. The Wampanoag, in ways which are not plain to me, in concert decided upon their own observance of father’s passing. They marked it in a most singular manner. As soon as father’s loss became known to them, each one, when traveling up or down the island, would fetch from the shore a smooth white stone such as can oft be found there. These they carried until they passed the place where father had taken farewell of them. There they deposited them. Within days, there was a cairn. In the weeks that followed, you could say, a monument, each stone of it placed with the care of an artisan. The last I saw, it had grown higher than a man, and still the Wampanoag came, one by one, placing a stone upon a stone. I cannot say if they do this still, or what by this time it might look like, but I picture it, white snow fallen upon white stones, the meltwater slicked into curtains of shining ice that catch the flares of the setting sun.
In the early weeks, after we heard of this thing, Makepeace and I made a habit to ride out there, to see how it went on. We each of us felt called to the place, and would linger. The stones had a kind of inner radiance that answered to the sun’s changing light at different times of the day. It seemed a speaking sort of monument, unlike the mute gray headstones in the English burying ground. We were, I think, taken aback by its power to touch our deeper feelings, every time we went to it.
Something had changed between my brother and me, since Solace’s death. I knew how he suffered, even in his accustomed silence. He, for his part, had thrown over his habit of constantly passing judgment on me. I believe he allowed himself to see that I was engaged in a great struggle against the prideful, independent nature he had deplored, and I think that at last he began to give me credit for my effort.
We sat before the stones in silence. In time, we began to speak about father. I did not say a great deal at first, confining myself to pious platitudes such as I thought my brother would find consoling. But one day he turned to me, raking his hand through his poor hair. (The tufts that had fallen out had started to regrow, but the short ends stuck out strangely.)
“Do you think that pawaaw killed our father?”
I looked at my hands and tried to still a slight tremor.
“I think … I believe he meant to. But surely we must hold that it is the Lord who dispenses tragical providences. Father is not the first of his faithful servants to be the subject of a dismal dispensation. To concede unto the pawaaw such a prodigious mastery…”
“I think he did,” Makepeace interrupted. “I think he killed him as surely as if he had raised a warclub and stove in his skull.”
“But Makepeace, think what you say. If the mist and gale rose to his order, it means Satan’s diabolical designs o’ermaster those of God. Can that be? You surely cannot believe so….”
“I think he should be brought to account for these awful works of wizardry. I have said as much to grandfather. As magistrate, he should act….”
“But Makepeace, grandfather is magistrate to the English only. His writ does not run among the people who answer to their sonquems.”
“So he said to me. His exact words, in fact. But if he will not act, I am of a mind to solicit the help of Giles Alden.”
“Brother, no!” I jumped up from my mossy stone seat and paced the ground. “It would be just the opening he craves. Why, he would do it, with a high heart, and bring war upon us if he could. Do you think he would stop with Tequamuck? And even if he did, do you think Tequamuck’s followers would leave such a thing unanswered? Some one or more English would be killed, then Alden would have the pretext he has long sought to dispeople this island. He would have his musket-wielding fanfarroons from the mainland cross here. It would be a slaughter—”
I caught Makepeace’s hands up in my own. I stared into his face. “You must see. It is the last thing our father would wish for….”
