The Pilgrim (17 page)

• • •

Next morning, at dawn, the
Swan
set sail to search for the place wherein Weston's company would establish a colony. The wind was full east and cool. Abigail and I lingered on the beach until the ship disappeared over the horizon to the northeast.

She said, “Let us make the most of the time we have left to spend together.”

We agreed to meet every afternoon when we finished our appointed work.

On the day following, I went to weed in the cornfield. Just before noon, as I pulled a handful of weeds from the crumbling earth, my eye caught the yellowish tassel protruding atop a red ear of corn from its sheath of pointed leaves. I peeled the leaves back an inch or two. An ant was crawling on one of the red kernels. I gazed at my gloved right hand, holding the weeds with their roots covered with soil, and the shallow hole left in the earth around the stalk. Then I digged beneath the stalk's roots. There I saw the backbone of a herring that had rotted away.

Then my soul flowed joyfully into those elements of fecundity, ordained by God to bring forth the fruit of the earth for man. I was one with the sunlight, the soil, the rain in its season, and those herring bones. We were nurturing that red ear of Indian corn together. I sang, “Hey down, a-down, down-derry. Among the leaves so green, o!”

Then my joy dissipated. I was once more sundered from the primal unity of things.

Abigail and I met late that afternoon without the common house. I told her what had happened to me in the cornfield.

She said, “Take care, sweetheart! It may have been the Devil that deluded thee.”

“Wherefore?”

“Why, to puff you up with pride.”

I said, “In truth, I am proud of what happened to me in the cornfield.”

We prayed that God chasten my pride. The sun began to set.

Abigail said, “When I was a child of nine or ten, I was sore afraid of the dark. Night after night, when my candle went out, I cried out to my darling brother the old childish rhyme:

Brother, dear brother, fetch me a light!

Satan's come hither to give me a fright.

And darling Henry came to me with a freshly lit candle and stood at the head of my bed until I fell asleep.

“Now I lie abed by the feeble light of a stinking fish-oil lamp. I cannot sleep for my terror of the Indians. I cannot forget Massasoit's men singing and dancing on the Street. Their high whining voices were demonical. I fear the savages will massacre us in the night, like those savages who massacred our countrymen in Virginia. When that stinking oil lamp flickers out, I cry,

Brother, dear brother, fetch me a light!

Satan's come hither to give me a fright.

And darling Henry arises from his bed by the chimney with his cutlass and a burning reed torch and remains by my bed until I fall asleep.”

I said, “When we are married, I will watch over you every night.”

She said, “And I shall be subject to you in all things. My father taught me that the proper attitude of a wife to her husband should be a reverent subjection. My womanly nature shall ensure my sweet submission to you.”

• • •

I chose twenty of Weston's men who wanted to learn how to shoot. Each armed himself with a match-lock musket, ten pounds of powder, five pounds of shot, and a forked gun rest. At noon on Wednesday, the twenty-one of us lined up on the west bank of the Town brook with Captain Standish's forty musketeers. I spied Henry Winslow, wearing a bandolier and armed with his cutlass, a musket, and a dagger in a green leathern scabbard.

Little Captain Standish looked every inch the soldier in his pikeman's helmet and chain-mail coat, with his rapier on his hip. He spake in a loud voice: “You new men will learn to do everything at my command. I will call out, ‘Forward march!' and placing your left foot first, you will march in step together, carrying your muskets, with lit matches, upon your left shoulders.

“At my next command, which will be ‘Halt!' you will do just that and remain in a straight line. Then, upon my command ‘Rest!' you will rest your musket's barrel upon your forked gun rest.”

Next, he taught us the commands to charge our muskets, prime our pans, blow on the ends of our burning matches, take aim, and shoot. He said, “Your target will be that oak, some forty yards to the east, on the far side of the brook. Hold your breath, exhale a bit, and slowly squeeze the trigger.”

After three weeks practice, we learned to accomplish the aforesaid orders. I delighted in each roar of our muskets firing together in clouds of sulphurous smoke. From whence comes such indecent joy?

Late one afternoon, Master Brewster said to me, “Squanto espied two great whales in the Bay yesterday, the best kind for oil and bone. They each gave a snuff of water and swam out to sea. We must learn to hunt them.”

He and I talked again in Latin about Cambridge. He said, “I practiced archery at Peterhouse. I am as proficient with the bow as Squanto.” We discussed the prose of Hermogenes and the orations of Cicero.

After sunset, we walked west with Abigail and Master Brewster upon the highway to the Town brook. I lighted our way with a smoky reed torch dipped in pitch drawn from pine. The wind was full east and cool. Ripening cornstalks rustled in the nearby fields. Crickets chirped in the long grass. The shrill song of the cicadas rose and fell in the bushes and trees.

Brewster said, “God clothes the world in the summer season with a pleasant dress, delightful to the senses and profitable for use. Praise God for the summer season!”

For more than a week, in the evenings, I watched Rigdale make a pine Bible box for Master Brewster. Rigdale carved beautiful embellishments; he taught me their names: rosettes, lunettes, vertical flutes. He gave the box to Brewster on a Tuesday evening, whilst Abigail was visiting us.

Master Brewster said, “I thank you, Mr. Rigdale. You have made me an Ark that is worthy of the Holy Bible that will repose within. What are these fanciful birds that you have carved on top?”

Rigdale said, “They are nightingales, sir, or rather what I imagine nightingales look like. I have never seen one, but I once heard its liquid song in the Southwark graveyard.”

I said, “Are there any nightingales in New England, Master Brewster?”

“Alas, we have none. Instead of their liquid song, as Mr. Rigdale so precisely describes it, we have the grievous cry of noisome beasts like the fox and the bear and the wolf.”

Abigail said. “And the demonical singing of savages.”

Brewster said, “Squanto is teaching me the language of the Pokanokets. We must be more perfectly acquainted with their language, and they with ours, that we may trade with them and press upon them spiritual things. The Pokanoket word for God is
Manitu
. We must council them in the worship of the true God.”

Abigail said, “Foxes, bears, wolves, and savages. This is a wild place that God hath given us for our refuge. Wild and strange.”

Abigail, Rigdale, Master Brewster, and I left Brewster's house and walked into the bright moonlight.

Master Brewster said, “I was a stranger in Holland for twelve years. My youngest son, Reborn, died of the measles in Leyden. He was but five years of age. We lived in the
Stink-steeg
, which means Stench Lane. Its rancid odors were to me the smell of exile. I feared that my five surviving sons would grow up as Dutchman and lose the true religion and their language—our precious English tongue. Many children of my fellow exiles profaned the Sabbath. Some became soldiers, others sailors; others took to worse courses, to their parents' grief, their souls' danger, and the dishonor of God.”

The moon went behind a cloud. I could not see Abigail's face. She cried out, “Son of God, shine on me in the dark. Save my soul!”

Brewster said, “Fear not, woman! Have faith, and God's bowels will yearn toward you in your distress, and His grace will encompass you as one of His Saints.”

She said, “How shall I know that I am saved?”

He said, “You will feel separated from your present life, which is a pageant of foolish delight, a theatre of vanity, a labyrinth of error, and a gulf of grief.”

Rigdale said, “My life is a gulf of grief for my dead wife and daughter.”

• • •

Henry decided to build himself and Abigail a house. He said to Abigail, “It will belong to you when you are married.”

He cast lots and won a plot on the south side of the Street. Pratt, Rigdale, Captain Standish, Edward Stanton, and I helped with the work. Before we began, Rigdale recited the words from Psalm 127:1, “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.”

I had never built a house before. We started in the northern woods, where the inhabitants of Plymouth procure their timber. Stanton handed me a felling ax and said, “Use an up-and-down stroke. Try to keep the blade from turning to the side. Take care that it does not glance off the wood and cut you in the leg. Such a wound will most likely mortify, and you will surely die of it. Above all, cut only one side of the tree so it will fall in the opposite direction.”

Though I wore my gloves of kid, the ax handle raised bloody blisters on my sweaty hands. We felled four pine trees, sixty to eighty foot in length, and a tall oak. My education in the wilderness proceeded apace. Standish taught us how to make clapboards on the site from a balk of wood four foot in length. I learned to use a frow and beetle. We dragged the timber down the Street, where we set the large oaken posts into sills that rested upon level stones and tied them together by horizontal oaken beams that marked the space under the rafters.

I learned that the rafters rested on a pair of horizontal beams which were called plates; the floor of the space under the rafters was called the loft; each pair of vertical posts, spaced sixteen foot apart, made what is called a bay. Abigail and Henry's house consisted of two bays—the hall and the parlor. The chimney was in the center.

One evening, I said to Abigail, “When you and I are married, we shall sleep together by the fire in this hall.”

She said, “I long for your embrace and long to embrace you.”

We dined well. Captain Standish went fowling at dawn every morning and returned with fat ducks and geese. Abigail dressed them and fetched us beer.

One morning, as I was cutting notches in the studs, I looked east on the Street at the crowd of men and women going about their daily business. I recognized Richard More with his servant, Edward Story, William Mullins, Peter Brown, John Goodman, and Master Brewster. I was sure that each of them was a Saint; each had been regenerated, born again into a new life, which they shared. Edward Story was carrying a bundle of faggots for his master, who clasped Brewster's hand as they spake. How I envied them!

Rigdale made two pine bedsteads, three oaken stools, and a table for Abigail and Henry. Rigdale, Pratt, Henry, Standish, Stanton, and I finished building the house on the twenty-first of August, the day that everyone began harvesting the pot herbs, the salad herbs, and the physic herbs in his garden.

That selfsame day, Abigail and Henry lodged in their house. She said to her brother, “I shall keep house for you until one of us is married. I shall bake your bread, dress your meat, brew your beer, and mend your shirts and breeches. I shall wash your bedclothes and sweep the floors, for you are my only brother and protector, whom I have ever loved.”

God forgive me! I was jealous of Henry.

He and Abigail served dinner for eight people: themselves, Stanton, Rigdale and Pratt, Master Brewster, Captain Standish, and me. We ate three fat geese that Captain Standish had shot.

Stanton said to me, “I was once a printer. I have a library in my house of some two dozen books that I printed in London and Leyden. I was like a soldier who sees no fair weapon, but wishes for it. I could not see a good or rare book, but did covet to print it. Have you read
Pelly's Pilgrimage
?”

“No,” I said.

“But you must! It is a revelation! I have a copy in my library. Come borrow it tonight. Its full title is
Pelly, His Pilgrimage, or the Histories of Man, Relating the Wonders of His Regeneration, Vanities in His Degeneration, Necessity of His Regeneration
.”

I borrowed it that night and read some twenty pages. I could not stomach its rhetorical style.

About this time, I made the acquaintance of Will Winslow, Edward's brother, who was one of the five-and-thirty settlers who had arrived at Plymouth on the
Fortune
in November 1621.

Said he, “We are called ‘the Strangers' by the members of the Plantation who came here on the
Mayflower
. Only five-and-twenty of us are Separatists. The rest are members of the Church of England.

“We were all gathered together in London by Thomas Weston. Our first glimpse of New England was Cape Cod, which is but a naked and barren place. When we were landed in Plymouth, there was not so much as biscuit-cake or any other victuals for us. Neither had we any bedding, nor pot, nor pan to dress any meat in, nor many clothes.

“We put up our huts made of clapboard and thatched roofs. The Mayflowers, as we call them, cut their daily provisions in half to feed us. But there is a division still between us. We are all lusty young men. Not many of us are married. The Mayflower husbands are jealous of us for befriending their wives. Worse than that, as I said, some of our men belong to the Church of England, and they are not allowed to pray or keep the Sabbath according to their papist customs. They wanted to send to London for a Church of England Minister to tend to their spiritual needs. But of course, Governor Bradford refused them permission. Methinks it will be a long while, if ever, that the two distinct communities inhabiting this place become as one.”

Thereafter, I tried to perceive whether a lusty young man I passed on the street was a Stranger or a Mayflower. They all looked the same to me.

By the tenth of September, the victuals in the common house were almost spent. The sky was empty of fowl. The bay and creeks near us were full of bass and other fish, yet for want of strong netting, we could not catch them. And though the sea swarmed with cod, we had neither tackling nor hawsers for the Plantation's six shallops. (These small sailboats made Captain Standish violently sick, but he often sailed in them.) God in His mercy provided us with divers shellfish that could be taken by hand on the beach. Like the Indians, we ate them roasted and raw.