Caleb's Crossing (11 page)
“Well, I—” I gazed into Noah’s open countenance. His pale blue eyes looked back at me with curiosity. Was this youth really destined to be my spouse? I felt next akin to nothing in my heart that said it should be so. But if it were to be, I must not lie to him now. What manner of marriage could be built upon a foundation of untruth? The falsehood that was forming on my lips, I swallowed. “Yes,” I said. “Though it is a most difficult tongue.”
“I know it! I cannot retain above two or three words of it—I was never one for rote learning. Father does better, but ’tis a struggle for him also. How marvelous that you can converse with them! It would be a great thing for us if someone from our household could have easy speech with them—we could do much if we understood each other better.”
Now it was my turn to color. Did he mean to say he already counted me a potential member of his household? Or did I, knowing what I should not, feel too conscious of an innocent observation? Either he was too forward, or I was too fretful. But if father had not given me a full accounting of the understanding regarding myself and the Merrys … At that thought, I felt the ember of anger flare suddenly and burn white hot.
“Shall we turn?” I said. “I am ready to go in.”
As we walked back to the house, I kept my eyes on the ground so as not to notice the low autumn sun spangling across that extravagance of glass.
Father returned at noon time, and we set out for home soon after, in order to reach Great Harbor before dark. Although father tried to project a sober mien, I could tell he was fairly bursting with joy. Nahnoso had made a remarkable recovery, and seeing in it a sign of the English God’s power, had asked to be instructed in the ways of the one true God and his son, Jesus Christ. “To convert a sonquem, Bethia … this will be a turning point for the mission, I know it. And such a sonquem, related so closely to that wizard, Tequamuck … to defeat such as he … if we can but break his hold on the people … Christ has had a great victory here, daughter. A great victory. Nahnoso has agreed to receive Iacoomis and to take instruction from him in the gospel. When he is well, he will bring his family to hear me preach at Sunday meeting in Manitouwatootan.”
His family. Surely that must include Caleb, his son. What would his father’s change of heart mean for him? Would his father order a stop to his heathen quest? As fallen as I felt, and heavy in my own sin-stained soul, I prayed to God to keep Satan from Caleb until his father could fetch him back out of the wilderness.
As for
my
family, we returned home that night to an evening of uncommon rejoicing. Father was full of his triumph, and I had never seen mother more radiant than she was that night, hanging upon his words. Her condition was patent by then, and it had put an uncommon bloom upon her. I overheard her confide to Goody Branch, not long after, that she had never carried easier than she did with that babe, who would become our Solace, and her mortal bane. Perhaps the joy she found in those last months was a mote of God’s mercy, gifted to her, even as he shaped within her the instrument of his retribution unto me.
T
he hour is late. It is gone past midnight, so already the Lord’s Day is upon us. Once again I sin, breaking the Sabbath by sitting up to scrawl these words. On the morrow, at this hour, Caleb will be asleep in the room below.
I am bone weary, having risen early these past days and stayed too long awake to write these pages. I have not yet set down all I purposed, though I have given here the better part of it, which is the account of my own sins. My eyes are heavy, so I will add but a brief account of how we are come to the present circumstance.
I witnessed none of what follows, but rather had to prise every fact from father’s talk with others when he thought he was not overheard. The short of it: father did not get his sonquem convert, nor did he break the power of the pawaaw Tequamuck.
When Iacoomis traveled out to preach the gospel to Nahnoso, as had been arranged, he was met by Tequamuck in full sorcerer’s regalia. A kind of duel took place between them, Tequamuck pitting his spells and demonic familiars against Iacoomis’s sacred prayers. Iacoomis stood firm, proclaiming that his God was greater than all of Tequamuck’s familiar spirits. Neither man yielded. In the end, Nahnoso stood with his kinsman, and declined to hear Iacoomis that day, or any other. Whether Tequamuck worked upon Nahnoso’s reason or simply bewitched him, as father believed, I cannot say. Father, much distressed by Iacoomis’s account, rode out himself to see Nahnoso. He brought the sonquem a stern message, warning that God would not be slighted; that, having once resolved to accept the truth of the gospel, to turn back to the devil had become a far graver sin. But Nahnoso, returned to full vigor, would have none of it and told father to trouble his mind no further. He argued fiercely, in words given him by Tequamuck: “You come here to disturb my rest with your tales of hell and damnation, but your tales are hollow threats, meant to scare us out of our customs and make us stand in awe of you. I will not hear your words.” He ordered father and Iacoomis banished from the Nobnocket lands.
Not even a month later, Nahnoso sickened again, this time with the greatest of all their scourges, the small pox. A sorer disease cannot befall them and their fear of it is very great. They that have this disease have it to a terrible extent—much worse even than we. For them, there is not the scattering of pox such as we are accustomed to suffer, but a vast clustering of pustules, breaking their skin and mattering all together.
When father first heard this report he was much grieved and made to go there, but Tequamuck persisted in refusing him to pass. We had little news of how the people fared, for the Wampanoag of Manitouwatootan were filled with dread and would not go there, not even those with family ties, no matter how father appealed to them to show Christian mercy. A sennight passed before one brave soul ventured there, and returned with a fearful report. Nahnoso had died; further, of a band numbering some hundreds, less than three score souls remained alive, and most of those were sore afflicted.
This news was too much for father. “If so many are dead there will be few to tend those that yet live,” he said. He and grandfather enlisted some other good men from Great Harbor—they refused me and Makepeace, saying that elders seemed better able to withstand this disease than the young—and set out with supplies. This, even though mother neared her time. But she urged father to go, saying that she had no fears for the outcome of her confinement, but great fears for his mission to the Indians, should he forsake them in such an hour of need. The party was away several days and we feared for them. But then one among them—James Tilman—returned to gather more supplies and to bring word that father was engaged in a great struggle to save as many who yet lived as God’s providence would allow.
Master Tilman was all grave looks as he asked mother to fetch what could be spared from our stores of food. When I went out with her to the buttery, we both of us overheard as he described the lamentable condition of the people to Makepeace. I could not meet mother’s eyes as the words drifted through the partition, but our hands, reached out to each other and clutched tight.
“One poor man, I thought to help him as he lay in his dreadful discomfort, so I attempted to lift him…” Tilman’s voice quavered and fell so low we could barely hear him. “I did not see that his poor broken skin had cleaved to the mat he lay upon, and a whole side of him flayed off as I turned him. He was all blood and gore, most terrible to look upon…” He broke off, and I heard heavy breaths as he strove to contain himself. Mother left me then and went in to warm a posset. She pressed him to drink it. As much as I felt for the general suffering, my mind was filled with thoughts of Caleb. I had wished him plucked from his quest in the woods. Now I prayed hard that he was out there still and not lying with his kinfolk, bloody and dying.
“’Tis well your husband pressed us to go there,” Tilman said to mother, when at last he recovered himself. “They have fallen down so generally of this disease that for some days they had not been able to help one another. They were without firewood and had burned their wood vessels—their mortars, their bowls, even their arrows in their extremity. Nanaakomin, the sonquem’s son, was one who had done this, before the disease claimed him. Later, I came upon his mother, the sonquem’s own squa, fallen dead by the wayside…. She and her babes had suffered so from thirst and none to bring water that she tried to crawl on all fours to the spring. I buried her, of course, and two of her babes with her. Your good husband has us bury them after their own fashion, tied up in deerskins. Those who survive thank him for this kindness and kiss his hands.”
My insides churned as I listened to this news. I came into the room then, and asked the question that was eating me alive: “I—I heard tell the sonquem had two sons? What of the other?”
Tilman shrugged. “No one spoke to us of a second son. They counted the loss of Nanaakomin so grave I cannot think there is another.”
It was Makepeace who noticed that mother was pale and sweating, and ushered her up the stairs to lie down upon the bed. It should have been me. But I was full of thoughts of Caleb, and negligent of those nearest me. I could not rid myself of the idea that Caleb was already perished. How else would his mother and kin lie dead and unattended? I plunged into a private grief at that moment, unable to unburden myself to any person as to why my heart ached so.
“Where is their wizard in all this?” Makepeace asked Tilman, once he returned from seeing to our mother. “I pray God has finally stricken him, or else how is it that you and father were permitted entry?”
“They say he yet lives. He spent himself, according to one who was able to tell of it, in all manner of sorceries, trying to turn the sickness away. And then, when his powers proved worthless, he went off, to do some other, stronger, secret rite—or so they think. For my part, I think it likely he made covenant with Satan, and left the place to save his own accursed skin.”
How often do we say that
God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform
. As God sent plagues upon the people of Egypt to free the captive Hebrews, so many here say he sent this plague upon the people of Nobnocket to free the souls of those enslaved to paganism. It is exceeding hard for me to agree that much good came from this terrible rain of death, so I say nothing when it is discussed. But the facts are these: The few who yet lived among the Nobnocket band saw the pox as a sign of God’s power, a punishment of Nahnoso, and testament to the rightness of my father’s preachments. All the more so since, through the marvelous providence of God, not one of the English who came to their aid was in the least measure touched by the sickness.
As they recovered, one by one, and then severally, most of those who survived defied Tequamuck, left their Nobnocket lands and joined the settlement at Manitouwatootan. Among them, at last, came Caleb. I learned much later that he had never been in Nobnocket during the season of sickness, nor even heard of it until its fury was spent and all his family killed. Tequamuck had gone to him in the woods and lived with him there through the long nights moon, performing heavy rituals, but not disclosing anything of the scourge that afflicted their kindred.
That spring, mother went to her childbed and did not rise from it. We entered our own season of mourning, all the heavier for me who knew I was to blame for mother’s death. During that time, our minds were turned from the losses of others. It was only much later that I learned that Caleb had come to Nobnocket at last. While I prayed at my mother’s grave, he walked the ruined remnant of his village and sought out the makeshift burying places of his family. His grief was great and his wrath at Tequamuck, for keeping the truth from his ears, waxed strong. He stayed with him only long enough to perform the death rites he deemed owed there. Then he went his own way, as he ever had, and removed to the praying town, saying he would know the English God better, before he judged whether to accept him or no.
When my father was in heart to return to his preaching, and went again to Manitouwatootan, Caleb sought him out there, to thank him for the mercy he had shown unto the sick and to ask what reward he might offer on behalf of his dead father, the sonquem. Father, much amazed by his proficiency in English, said that allowing his people to hear the gospel was reward enough. It was hard for me to prepare my face when father came home full of the miraculously wise youth who had walked out of the wilderness. Relief and joy brimmed up in me, so that I had to go out from the house and pace about before I could compose myself.
I had once yearned to take credit for Caleb’s instruction; now, in guilt at what my furtive doings had brought us to, I dreaded lest the connection be discovered. I said nothing, as father speculated as to how the youth had learned his English. It had got into his head that one of the mainland Wampanoag from Mashpee or Plimoth must have come here and instructed him. I let Makepeace question, although it cost me dearly to stay mute and feign only ordinary interest in the matter. There was one moment when I almost gave myself away. When father first announced that the young adept called himself Caleb, and wondered where the son of Nahnoso might have happened upon a Hebraic name, I let out a snort, and made as if I had choked upon a piece of bread.
Father commenced at once upon a course of instruction with him, and after every encounter the talk at board would be of the young man’s ready wit and remarkable progress.
And now Caleb is to quit Manitouwatootan to come here and live with us, so that father may increase his hours of instruction. He will take lessons alongside Makepeace and Joel, the young son of Iacoomis. Joel is two years the junior of Caleb, but he has been raised among the English and set to his book at an early age. Father has found him a quick study and says he is already well begun upon his Latin. Father came to me, just two days since, to give me, as he thought, the first news of our intended boarder. He had been anxious and diffident, thinking, as I suppose, that I would mislike to be in such close quarters with an Indian lad. He had prepared a long speech about how we all of us must carry our portion of the Cross, but I cut him off at the first opportunity and told him I would be very glad to help him further his mission in such a practical way, and that I looked forward to having the young man in our household. He was relieved at that, and has been giving me kind looks ever since.