Caleb's Crossing (34 page)
The buttery hatch was not three yards from where President Chauncy’s lectern was set up. I could keep faith with Master Corlett, and leave it closed, as he bade me, and yet still hear the lectures quite plain. Goody Whitby fell mum as soon as the president commenced to speak. I guessed it was a rule of the kitchen to make as little stir as possible, and I was glad of it. I had thought I might find the Latin difficult, but that first morning Chauncy addressed himself mainly to the freshmen, and expressed himself with simplicity. I could follow along with but little effort. His lecture that morning was a justification for an education in the liberal arts, and its relevance to the life of a minister, which, he said, “I expect, with the grace of God, will be the destiny of more than half of you now in this hall. The founders of this college sacrificed to build this place because they dreaded to depart this new world and leave but an illiterate clergy in the pulpits of its churches. So what need has such a minister for the poetry of Ovid, the rhetoric of Cicero and the philosophy of Aristotle? Were not these men pagans, living in the stews of anti-Christ and the devil’s house of lies? Perhaps so. One may say it, in the knowledge of their time and place.
“Yet all knowledge comes from God, who creates and governs all things. You will find many excellent divine moral truths in the works we will study together in this place—in Plato, in Plutarch and in Seneca. These pagans treated of the works of God most excellently. So does God use them to prepare the ground for the perfect teachings of Jesus Christ.
“The liberal arts that you will study here all inform us of the divine mind. They derive from it. They reflect it. We study no art for its own sake but to help us restore our connection with the divine mind. God’s reason is perfect, human reason no more than pale shadows.
“The Greeks had a goddess whom they named Eupraxia. For them, she was the spirit”—here he switched out of Latin and gave the Greek word,
diamona
—of right conduct. “I want you to develop a great fondness for that name, Eupraxia. We will invoke her here in this place many times. The whole object of your studies is summed in it—right action, right conduct, doing the right thing at the right time. All your works here are aimed to help you learn to discern the right—to winnow the chaff, to smelt off the dross….”
I had formed a rather unfavorable impression of Chauncy based on very slight observations of him. But now, as I listened, I perceived that the unkempt exterior and peremptory manners were only the unfortunate gown thrown atop a great intellect. Further, he had a wonderful way of taking high matters and bringing them down to the capacities of the scholars. I found as I listened an ear that I had not the least difficulty in following the line of his thought, even as I bustled about, helping Maude to prepare a hasty pudding of cornmeal, molasses and milk.
Chauncy was outlining how he proposed to divide the hours of study throughout the week. The Lord’s Day would be spent at meeting and at rest, but the scholars would be examined by their tutors upon the content of the sermons during the following week, to make sure they had attended to and profited from them. On the second and third days—Mondays and Tuesdays—freshmen would gather at eight and hear him lecture on logic and metaphysics. Sophomores, at nine, would hear ethics and natural science. Sophisters, at ten, would hear arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. I smiled. Listening from the buttery, I would have the profit of all of these lectures. In the afternoons, students would practice disputations upon the topics covered in the lectures, which the president would moderate. The fourth day of each week would be given over completely to the study of Greek. On Friday, scholars would toil upon Hebrew, until they had a grounding in that language, at which point they might add the study of Aramaic and Syriac. In the afternoon they would study the Bible. The sixth day, Saturday, was to be devoted to the practice of rhetoric and declamations.
When Chauncy concluded, Goodman Whitby herded the scholars out into the yard to stretch their legs while we all of us bustled to convert lecture hall into dining hall, setting up trestles and rearranging forms and stools. Promptly at eleven, the scholars filed in and took seats at their assigned tables. Then Chauncy, the fellows and the fellow commoners entered, in procession, and mounted the dais to the high table. As soon as they were seated, Whitby took up the Great Salt, and carried it with stiff formality through the hall, placing it before Chauncy.
The undergraduates ate off wooden trenchers and drank from pewter tankards or slipware mugs. Each carried his own knife and spoon. The high table dined off the college silverware. For all the stir and fiddle-faddle, the fare was plain and, I must say, insufficient. The service might have been plate, but the small dollop of pudding set down upon it was less ample than any but the poorest board might boast.
Perhaps it was the excitement of finally being in this place, but by afternoon I was tired and addled. As I cleaned the dinner things, I could not take much profit from the doings on the other side of the buttery hatch. The senior sophisters were disputing, and since their Latin was of a much higher level than mine, I could not follow the wit in their arguments. From time to time, I heard Samuel’s voice, as he joined with the president in moderating the debate. That was an added trial upon my powers of concentration.
At half past the hour of four, the Whitbys’ boy George tolled the bell for afternoon bever. I scanned the faces as they came to the hatch, waiting to see Joel and Caleb and get some sense of how they liked their new tutor. When they presented themselves, I could not read their expressions. I had thought to see them lit up with the delights of their first day in this place, but instead the spirits of both seemed sadly quenched, sober and withdrawn. I did not read too much into this, as we could hardly speak in the press of bodies all reaching hungrily for their bread and beer, which had to be consumed before evening prayers commenced at five.
At half past seven, we served a frugal supper—if the dinner fare was sparse, this could only be termed paltry—after which the scholars had a recreation hour to use as they would. I could tell that many of them gathered about the hall fire. I could hear them, talking and laughing together, as I cleaned and set the kitchen to rights for the next day. As much as I would have liked to stay and listen to their chatter, I was spent, and went away to my pallet long before the nine o’clock bell sounded to send the lingerers to their chambers.
I am writing these final words by the light of a tallow dip, both the Whitbys having made plain to me that they like it not. They fear the flame, in my curtained nook, lest I fall into a drowse and set the college all afire. I see that to keep the peace, I shall have to end this account here. It matters not. Now that I am got here, and my fate, for the nonce, is a settled matter, I do not feel so pressed to scrive my daily thoughts. The Whitbys are abed, and the son has commenced his bellows snore. The father, I suppose, stays for me, waiting wakeful to see my tallow safely snuffed. I will do so now, and let him have his hard-earned rest.
Anno 1715
Aetatis Suae 70
Great Harbor
T
his morning, light lapped the water as if God had spilt a goblet of molten gold upon a ground of darkest velvet.
I was awake to see it, as I generally am at sunrise. I do not know when it was I last lay down my head and slept through the night. I doze merely, night or day without distinction, in the brief intervals when pain ebbs and I can steal some rest. The deepest featherbed may as well be a gibbet for all the comfort I can find upon it. I gave up the idea of lying down to sleep some weeks since, because I cannot turn myself from that position and I will not trouble the others to be in constant attendance upon me. I have a chair and a footstool, quilts and pillows, and these I can arrange as I need, to ease an ache here or a teasing pain there.
I will die soon. I do not need the funeral looks in others’ eyes to tell me this. I have seen enough of death to know its signs. I can read my failing body in the laceration of every labored breath. When one of the children comes in, to see how I do, I no longer open my arms to invite an embrace. They are kind children, and would, if I signed to them, come and rest their sweet heads on my breast for a polite moment or two, but I will not subject them to the stench of my decay. In any case, these days, even a well-meaning caress leaves purple bruises on my skin.
God is gathering me, little by little. He has already taken much, but he has left me my sight, and for that I am thankful. I can still see the glory of his sunrise through the wavy panes of my chamber window. I can still watch the wind riffle across the water, the osprey’s sudden plunge from the sky, the thunderheads gathering in billowing, wine-dark blooms. I sit here, propped up like a poppet, and I watch. I watch, and I remember. Now, when everything else has gone, this is what remains: vision and memories.
Yester eve I asked them to bring me my inlaid box, the one I got in Padua the year of my marriage to Samuel. It had been an age since I had thought to look inside it. The sea air had rusted the clasps and the hinges, and my stiff hands fumbled for a while before I could prise it open. But the pages were there. The earliest, mere scraps, crumpled and stained, some with a few Latin sentences from Makepeace’s boyish hand, errors struck out with furious pen strokes before the spoiled sheet was tossed aside. Then the later pages with a few words in Elijah Corlett’s fair script, discarded perhaps for a small ink blot or an imperfect pen stroke. And on every sheet, my own scrawls, writ dense front and back.
My hand aches now, as I write these spidery lines. With each press of the pen, pain grinds the bones in my wrist. But I must write. Now, near the end, I feel an urge to finish the story I began, so many years since, when this new world and I were young and all things still seemed possible. I need, I suppose, to account for my life, and for my part in Caleb’s crossing from his world into mine, and what flowed on from it. Time is short, but I pray that he in whose hand my life rests will grant me days enough to make this accounting.
It took me the better part of this day to read over the faded dispatches from my girlish self. I had to stop many times, as memories crowded upon me and tears blurred my sight. Once, though, I came to a place where I laughed out loud—and paid for the mirth in the stinging spasm that followed. The lines that provoked me were those that my seventeen-year-old self had set down, foreseeing my old age and death.
Oh the self-weening certainty of the young!
Frail old crone—
she wrote. Well and good—she foresaw
that
fairly enough, but this next: …
good fruit ripened …
I smile again, as I copy down the words. I could tell that fatuous girl a thing or two about ripe fruit. Maggots and rot. Putrefaction and waste. A sour taste that lingers in the mouth.
Is it ever thus, at the end of things? Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage? I read on, and I find myself smiling at that sound-fleshed young girl, her daring and her folly and her many fears.
Now, when perhaps I should be most afraid, I find that there is very little left that can put me in dread. Not my death, surely; though a lifetime’s sermons tell me I have earned the hard judgment of an angry God. I do believe that God appointed the moment of my birth and the instant of my death and all the circumstances of my life in between. I wish I could say, as the elect among us are wont to say, that I would not turn a finger to alter his dispositions. But I cannot say so, for there is much I would change, were it within my power. Perhaps this is why God has not spoken to me. I do not expect that my salvation will be revealed to me in what little time remains. As I sit here, awake and aching, I am aware that this pain may be but a foretaste of what awaits me in eternity. Still, I do not choose to fear what I cannot know.
This I do know, for the surfeit of loss in my life has convinced me: it will be easier to be grieved for than to grieve.
I
worked for one year in the buttery of Harvard College. Through those thin walls drifted every kind of knowledge. I learned with freshmen and with seniors, imbibing the work of their four years in one, as Chauncy stood and gave his morning lectures to each successive class. I do not say that I understood all that I heard; how could I? One cannot place a pediment when one has not yet laid the foundation. Much of what was given out to the senior sophisters remained obscure to me. But I hoarded a sherd here and there, as I could, and as the year wore on some kind of odd edifice assembled itself. While I did not have the benefit of the scholars’ daily tutorials in which to interrogate what had been said, when I could snatch an hour with Samuel and his father, I plied them with questions. From them I was able to borrow books, and I would read till the Whitbys snuffed their candle. So was I able to make my way in several subjects.
For Hesiod, that ancient poet-farmer, I conceived a particular affection. Like me, he loved the natural world, and strove to find the words to set down what he saw. I could say that I learned my Greek memorizing the lines of his “Works and Days,” because they lodged in my mind so naturally it was as if he gave word to my own thoughts. It is his night sky that I see now, through the seasons: Arcturus rising brilliant from the ocean stream at dusk, Pleiades like a swarm of fireflies, Sirius parching the hayfields on hot late-summer nights, and Orion striding across the winter sky.