Caleb's Crossing (15 page)
Cambridge is an unlovely town. Those who settled here in the ’30s decreed that the first sixty houses be pressed tight together, for fear, I suppose, of assault by European rivals—the native inhabitants of the place having been laid waste long since by some earlier plague of which there is no record. The house lots, along a gridiron, are narrow, and the low ridge on which they were built has formed a barrier to the drainage of the land behind, so that in foul weather all turns swamp and mire. There is factory here, enough to rob the peace—tanner, brick maker, smith and shipbuilder fill the daylight hours with their clamor—yet not enough to bring prosperity. The roads remain too rough for carriages. Since the townsfolk do not trouble where they tip their slops, the air reeks, and everywhere the middens rise, rotting in steaming piles of clutter and muck. The creek is brackish, but even were it not, its waters would be unwholesome, since the township uses it as a drain. One must, in consequence, drink only the small beer, which makes my head ache and I cannot think helps the boys, especially the youngest, two of whom are not yet nine years old. Since there is no wood to spare for warming bathing water, the master expects the boys to wash in an outdoor trough from which they have to crack the ice each morning. Of course they do a poor job of it. I had to badger him for a little fat and lye to mix with ash for soap. I cannot think how it was before I came here. Even now, with soap in hand, the boys’ bodies are rank when pressed side by side on their benches in the schoolroom, and I can barely take a breath of the foetid air when I am obliged to clean their crowded sleeping loft.
It has all of it been sore trial for Makepeace, the oldest pupil here, a full two years senior to the next closest him in age. It may be why he traveled to the island at any excuse, to dine at a good board and sleep a few nights warmed by a decent fire, and to get some peace and solitude away from the rackety boys. Yet these absences did not prosper him in his studies, where the younger pupils all too often overpeered him. Whenever we walked out together, I saw his gaze travel the short distance from the school to the Harvard College. His gaze would follow the gowned scholars. He had a hungry look at such times, but a small frown played about his brow. I knew then that doubt ate at him as to whether he would ever take his place among them.
For Caleb and Joel, there is no such respite as Makepeace takes for himself. The island is barred to them by lack of means for the journey. I can only think it is insupportable for them here, in this world so strange, and in many ways so inferior, to the one they knew. For Caleb, especially, who lived most of his life as a natural man, to be cloistered up in this way is a vast change of condition, and I know full well how he struggles to fit himself to it. Several times, in the first weeks after we came here, something would disturb my sleep in the dark hour before dawn. I would turn on my pallet as a shadow passed across me. It was Caleb, stalking on silent feet, out the door and through the kitchen garth. He was looking, as I suppose, for a place to greet Keesakand. He does not do this now. I have not spoken to him of it, not wanting to rub upon a wound, so I do not know his reasons. I suppose that he looked for a place such as he was used to, from which to greet the sun, a place unsullied by the smear and stench of English industry. If so, he looked in vain, for upon every rod of nearby ground, man’s mark is already darkly etched.
It galls me, when I catch a stray remark from the master, or between the older English pupils, to the effect that the Indians are uncommonly fortunate to be here. I have come to think it is a fault in us, to credit what we give in such a case, and never to consider what must be given up in order to receive it. And yet, it is not for me to weigh this balance: Christ, and knowledge against a pagan pantheon and an unaccomodated wilderness existence. I must suppose that Caleb and Joel believe the scale weighs fair. For they keep faith with my father’s ambition for them and work diligently at their lessons. They are each of them determined to matriculate to Harvard next leaf fall. They have taken to heart father’s belief that they are destined to lead their people out of darkness, and to do so they must endure hunger and cold as they press their understanding to its limits.
I will say this for Master Corlett: he will extend himself to an extraordinary degree for those who wish to learn, instructing them late into the evening hours. I pray only that Caleb and Joel do not founder under the burden and that their health proves equal to the unwholesomeness of this place. They are strong, but even so, I see a change in them.
Joel has taken on something of the hungry looks his father once wore, in those days when first he haunted the edges of the English settlement, before he and father became friends. Sometimes, when I round a corner and see Joel unexpectedly, the resemblance strikes me. Iacoomis had prospered well amongst us in Great Harbor, rising from his outcast’s lot to become a skilled provider, who fed his brood good meat. But nowadays Joel has lost his well-fed fleshiness and is on the way to being scrawny. Caleb fares better, his body seasoned to yearly cycles of plentiful summers and leaner winters. How he will do, in time, with the constant and continuing privations of this place, I cannot say. Yet each day he gains another graceful turn of phrase or gentlemanly gesture, and his height and natural bearing give him a great distinction. He brims like a stream in spate, gathering all the knowledge that floods in upon him, whatever its nature. I note that he watches the other pupils, even the younger ones, if they are the more gently bred. From the first, he had an excellent ear for English, and now he speaks fluently and entirely without accent. So naturally does he carry himself, even with the highest among us, that very soon, I think, those who do not know his history will be hard put to guess it, and might take him for a Spaniard or Frank, or another among the darker of the civilized races.
Not so long ago, as I passed through the hallway by the schoolroom, I overheard the master ask him to read aloud a passage from the Hebrew bible. Since they had only recently commenced upon the study of that language, putting sounds to the strange, firey letters, I stopped there, my arms full of linens, to listen how he did. Master Corlett had asked him to choose a passage, and he had taken some verses from Jeremiah. I heard his voice, strong, confident with the guttural sounds that so closely resembled those of his own mother tongue. Since I came here I have heard that some learned men think that the Indians are the lost tribe of the ancient Hebrews, because of this similarity in the tongues. He went carefully, sounding each word in his head before he spake it aloud. At first, my heart lifted, to hear him get on so well with such difficult work. But there was that in his voice more foreign than the speaking of strange Hebrew words. His voice, in the ancient tongue, took on a different pitch and tone. It went through me that he chanted the words in the voice of a pawaaw … and, with that thought, I was under the gaily-colored headland again, the wild, fierce prayers rising into a flame-lapped sky.
My arms became slack. Some pieces of linen fell to the floor. As I bent to retrieve them, the master commenced to translate the Hebrew into English, and the full meaning of the passage fell into my heart:
“Let us go into the fortified cities and perish there; for the Lord our God has doomed us to perish, and has given us poisoned water to drink, because we have sinned against the Lord. We looked for peace, but no good came, for a time of healing, but behold, terror.”
At that, I caught another echo—of Tequamuck and his fearful prophecies. If it is indeed so, that the Indians of this place are lost Jews, perhaps such as Tequamuck are the Jeremiahs of their race. Not for the first time, my mind ran on what had happened to Caleb in those wilderness months. Was he, as Makepeace held, a vessel through which darkness yet trickled, a conduit that might carry the taint of evil into God’s own churches…?
Of course it was not so. These morbid imaginings sprang from exhaustion, merely. Yet tears filled my eyes. They come all too easily now. They come now, again, even as I write this. It seems I could weep forever, and yet not empty the reservoir of my grief.
T
his night, I read over what I have set down here, and resolved to be more clear in my account going forward. I must not jump hither and yon, as I did in my writing yester eve. And this, also: I must refrain from indulging in excesses of sensibility and flights of morbid imagination. The last of the lines I wrote are smeared because I gave way to myself. Despair is a sin, and I had best not add it to my ledger. I will strive therefore, not only to maintain an exact diligence in my place, but to set out in plain words what passed that season on the island and try withal to see God’s hand in it:
Whatever joy there might have been in the summer that followed Caleb’s coming to us, it ended on a day so sweet and still that I moved through it as if floating in a bath of honey. It had rained hard the night before; that kind of heavy, sharp-scented summer rain that lays the dust and washes the pollen from the air, leaving everything rinsed and bright. The fragrance of ripeness and bloom grew more pungent as the morning waxed fair. The harbor sparkled, and when the lightest of breezes rippled through the sea grass, each blade shimmered like a filament of beaten silver.
On a day so Godsent, your mind is untroubled, the entire world seems well. You gird for tragedy on a different sort of day—a day of bleak gray sky, blowing mists and bitter, howling winds. You pray to avert ill fate on such a day. This I know. But on that day, my thoughts were all of fruitfulness and promise. Even when a rough-footed hen crossed my path in early morning, which all know for a token of fell tidings, I discounted the omen. It was not possible to imagine that anything should go awry on such a day.
I went out to pick the ripened beans and squash. They were coming in so plentiful I had to take two whiskets to carry home the yield. I liked to pick at first light, if I could slide from the shakedown without wakening Solace. It was lovely to do the chore in the cool, dew-moistened field. But if she waked, as she did that morn, I had to set the task aside till after dinner, in the full heat of the day, while she napped. I would see her settled in her crib as father commenced the lessons. If she stirred before my return, Makepeace would gather her up and jostle and coo at her for the short time necessary. He never shirked or complained of this: Solace was the one being with whom he did not feel constrained in expressing his true affections. Also, as I now think, it gave him some relief during the lesson; some cover for his slowness. This is how we went on every day, and I had no reason to question the arrangement.
Because the day was so fair, I did not hurry through the picking, as I did when heat thickened the air. I dawdled about, sampling the young filet beans, crisp and juicy, right off the stem. Then I ambled home at a leisurely pace. I sang a psalm as I walked, and barely thought to hush myself until my hand was upon the door latch. Father was reading aloud the Polyphemus episode from Homer, and you could have heard a needle drawn through cloth, so quiet were his listeners. Since there was no stirring from Solace’s crib, I conceived that she napped still. I untied my hat, flicked it playfully up onto the peg rail and busied myself in the buttery unloading the whiskets, setting out some of the tenderest beans to eat fresh, laying the fatter ones upon racks to dry and shell for winter store. I will own it: I too listened to father read the familiar tale, waiting for my pet lines, where Odysseus in his pride discloses his identity and brings on the wrath of Poseidon that will cost him and all his men so dearly. It is a stirring passage. I was struck, as always, that a heathen poet from long ago should know so much of the human heart, and how little that heart changes, though great cities fall and new dispensations sweep away the old and pagan creeds.
I pondered this for a good while even after father left off his reading and set the boys to translation. Finally, I was minded to see to Solace. I went in, and found the crib empty. I looked under the board and in the corners and all about the room, feeling no misboding, thinking only to discover her playing quietly in some unlikely place.
But finding her not, I interrupted father to ask where she might be.
He looked at me, startled, and then glanced all about him in confusion.
“She was here just now presently. She woke, and was making a fret, so I told Makepeace to set her down here, by me….”
Caleb and Makepeace were already on their feet, followed by Joel. Makepeace did as I had already done, and searched round and about him. We all of us moved in confusion, increasingly frantic, calling her name. But Caleb went straight as an arrow to the place, covering the short way in a few long strides.
She was facedown in the shallow hole, not yet three feet deep, that was to have been our new well. There was rainwater from the night’s shower puddled there, inches merely. Yet somehow enough to steal breath from a babe who crawled to the edge, tottered on her unsteady little feet, and tumbled in.
Caleb snatched up her limp, muddy little body and ran back to where I stood with father in the garth. He was crying out in Wampanaontoaonk. Makepeace, coming from the house, saw, and howled like a wounded beast.
As Caleb handed her into father’s outstretched arms, I remember the water, dripping off her hem and sluicing from her silky hair. I remember that the droplets sparkled in the sunlight, as if an angel scattered gems in the way of her ascending soul.
I
t was like Zuriel’s death, lived a second time. Father had blamed himself then—I think, groundlessly—for running the wain over Zuriel, and now he blamed himself for lack of attention to Solace when she was in his care. His pain was all the greater, perhaps, because Mother was not at his side, requiring his strength to help her bear it. Indeed, the loss of the babe stripped the scab that had formed over the wound of losing mother. It had been just a little more than a year since her death, and now we found our grief for her ran fresh, feeding this new anguish.